A – Z Challenge – Day 15
For hatred does not cease by hatred at any time: hatred ceases by love-this is an old rule. The Dhammapada
Offering
We’re standing at a portal into something radically new.
On Sunday morning, I heard astrologist Anne Ortelee describe this week (and next) as weeks in which ‘profound changes’ will take place on earth. As weeks we will ‘look back on’ and remember where we were and what we were doing in April 2014.
We had a total lunar eclipse the other night. I stood in my yard and watched the moon turn red, becoming a ‘blood moon.’ Desert wrens and doves stuttered and chattered in the darkness and dogs howled in the distance. Stars poked through the veil of sky and I felt like I was watching a door open — a portal — to a possible future for humanity. There was a stillness to it. I stood there under the sky as sentient and celestial beings moved.
I heard later than millions were watching it with me.
Afterward, I could not sleep. I slept for an hour and then woke up. The pattern repeated all night. My cats were restless and the dog couldn’t calm down.
In the sky – heading into Easter and Earth Day – the Cardinal Grand Cross is tightening.
Expect the unexpected. Things are coming to a head. Secrets will be spilled, fires started, mountains moved. This is just the beginning.
There’ll be another eclipse at the end of the month. In between we’re being stretched beyond the former limits of our capacity as human beings. We’re being cooked by life.
***
“A chickpea leaps almost over the rim of the pot
where it’s being boiled.“Why are you doing this to me?”
The cook knocks him down with the ladle.
“Don’t you try to jump out.
You think I’m torturing you.
I’m giving you flavor,
so you can mix with spices and rice
and be the lovely vitality of a human being.Remember when you drank rain in the garden.
That was for this.”~ Rumi, translation by Coleman Barks
***
Burning
The first time I heard this poem by Rumi, I got a little teary. I imagine I was going through something or another (because I am always going through something or another) and it stirred my heart, opening my chest and touching the slippery silver inside me.
When we are in the process of change — when everything around us is whirling and everything beneath us falls away — that is when we must have divine trust in the process of our own evolution. We are in a place now where everything we’ve ever known is about to change. For some of us, we’re standing on the shore ready to launch our boats into the river’s currents. Our hearts are thumping furiously in our chests. We’re excited. We’ve waited our whole lives for this moment.
At the same time, others around us are wailing and clinging to every branch and bramble along the banks. They’re hoarding the moment — trying desperately to go back into darkness, back into the nearby forest. Their fear and loss is palpable. They don’t believe that this unknown country we are building will be one they like. They prefer the supposed comfort and safety of the known world, even as it burns down around them. Even as the embers and huge flames chase them to the water’s edge, they don’t want to launch their boats. They would rather burn with the old, than swim toward the new.
***
Becoming
These times require a courageous, open heart.
They require a willingness to start the journey without knowing how it will end.
Like the moments before we were born, we cannot know right now how beautiful and luminous the light will be where we are going. We cannot know that our mother’s breast will nourish us and that our father will kiss the top of our heads and hold us like a precious gem once we arrive.
Divine trust.
The ability to swallow our fear, and walk into the water.
This river of life knows where it’s going. It knows. And if we are willing — if we are completely raw and willing — if we offer up an open heart to the wilds of life, we will see this new world born.
So, keep your head above water and let the current take you. You are safer heading openly toward the new world, than you ever were in the old one.
Let it fall away.
© 2014 Shavawn M. Berry All rights reserved
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