The Pandemic as Global Initiation

The Pandemic as Global Initiation

“Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state. Suffering can be likened to a baptism - the passing over the threshold of pain and grief and anguish to claim a new state of being.” - George Elliot

It is dawning on me that the covid pandemic is a kind of worldwide initiation test, if we make it so, by allowing it to be. An initiation is a bridge to greater responsibility. It is a rite of passage into a higher level. 

It is a test, usually an ordeal, and not everyone passes it. Initiations tend to be scary and dangerous. It is like the trial by fire, in which all that is not valuable (the true gold) is burned away, leaving us purified. 

It is usually some sort of odyssey in which our usual ways of doing things must change. So, it interrupts patterns so new ones can replace them.

Sometimes the proverbial hero’s journey ends in failure. The hero is lost. The hero loses the fight. The would-be hero is traumatized and fatally scarred.

Initiations are inherently perilous. So they are only worth the undertaking if we come out better. If we emerge wiser and more useful.

But it is essential to embark on the test voluntarily, or else it is not an initiation, but merely a catastrophe.

If this is a global initiation, and not a mere random ordeal, then what are we being initiated into? For starters, an awareness of how interconnected we have become, how much we affect each other, and yes, how much we need each other. And hopefully, we are learning new ways to help each other. Paradoxically, as we stand apart, we are growing closer.

Are we learning? Or just denying? Responding, or just reacting? Adapting, or just postponing? This break from business as usual will gradually fade, and the interruption or the opportunity will pass. Things will have changed, and will never go back to how they were. But will they be better?

Disruption

Disruption

People used to proudly call themselves disrupters. They said, “If it ain’t broke, break it”. Disruption is a word that has been lightly and causally tossed around in the past few years, by overconfident overprivileged young males, mostly. At least, until real actual disruption happened with the Great Pandemic of 2020. Had enough disruption?

Not nearly enough, I fear. Has this time out from business as usual really made us aware of the enormity of the challenges we face, like it or not, for the better or worse? Have we learned the lessons offered by this crisis-opportunity? I fear not...

Has this wake up call served to give us a chance  to reassess our ways, or only sensitized us to our addiction to things as they are, hardening and strengthening our attachments?  When the economics are tough they say we can’t afford to change our destructive ways. But when the economics are roaring hot, we are told we can’t afford to slow things down either. So when, exactly, will we stop the way we are going so as to not end up where we are headed?! 

Who is saying this? All of us who don’t want to do anything in a different way, because, fear. Fears of losing what we have, fears of not being able to do whatever we are in the habit of doing, in just exactly the way we are doing it now. This is further codified into law, by the monetary power and influence of big corporations.  

History is full of headlong rushes to destruction, despite the cries and warnings at the time. The Earth is full of degraded landscapes, now wastelands, where forests once stood, where streams once gushed with sparkling pure water, birds flew in flocks so big the sky was dark with them, rivers so full of fish that you could walk across them on the fish, meadows so thick with flowers that as John Muir once wrote about his walk across California, you stepped on a hundred wildflowers every step of the way, all the way.

Already I can hear the resumption of the roar. Where I live you can actually hear the roar of the city below in the valley bowl, and the uptick of airline flight overhead.

This disruption we are perpetuating on the planet sure needs some disruption. And soon.

“The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.”

– Albert Einstein

Put it in the Cosmic Cloud

The World Healing Bank was formally conceived in the early weeks of the pandemic of 2020. It runs on Reiki donations.

Reiki is just generic God-stuff, an undifferentiated healing essence, that we could also call life force, love, blessings, etc, for the purpose of this writing. You can “send love”, as they say. The main thing is your intention, combined with some effort in the form of an action such as a thought, visualization, touch, breath, or any deliberate and conscious action. So we are dealing with Reiki here, but to participate, you need only to have love to give, or need some.

World Healing Bank was set up last spring, and you can read about it here:

http://omnimountainskyrainbow.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-world-healing-bank.html

Though it is not a physical building, it is very real, more real than a bank with money in it. All you have to do if you need some healing, is ask for it. It is always free.

If you have some healing love to give, send it on in. It is always open.

You can offer it to any and all and know that it will be dispensed as needed. Reiki comes with its own wisdom guidance system. You can just give, and trust.

If, on the other hand, you perhaps want to send some healing love to a particular person, being, creature, planet, or ecosystem, or to an event, time, or place, you can just designate it and an account will open just for that cause.

Isn’t that what prayer is, you may ask? Yes. This is a form of prayer. But it is also like a food bank, where people bring in actual food, for specific actual people to eat, on specific actual days, when they need it. In both cases everything ultimately comes from the One, the Source, from Infinite Creator. And you can surely pray for someone any way that you may wish.

In this world, at this time, all ways of delivering help are useful. The ritual of consciously packaging and sending aid to  help out gives much needed healing to the sender as well as the intended recipient. 

The world is a stage to practice our love and act it out in real life. It is a dance you can get better at with repetition. It is a planet full of specific beings and particular needs, otherwise we need not be individuals with bodies doing things with things! If you pray for a loaf of bread, and I made an extra loaf today, then I get the pleasure and honor of being the conduit of the answer to your prayer. 

This is how the World Healing Bank operates. You bake the loaf, package it the way you would like, address it to your intended recipient or to the WHB for wise dispensation, smile, and know that you have made a contribution. You are blessed, and we are all richer. Your contribution is an addition to the great reservoir of “bodhicitta”, or accumulated virtue, available for all to draw upon. The whole world is uplifted.

“There's a wonderful old Italian joke about a poor man who goes to church every day and prays before the statue of a great saint, begging, ‘Dear saint-please, please, please...give me the grace to win the lottery.’ This lament goes on for months. Finally the exasperated statue comes to life, looks down at the begging man and says in weary disgust, ‘My son-please, please, please...buy a ticket!’

      Prayer is a realtionship; half the job is mine.”  -Elizabeth Gilbert 

Big Leaf Maple Art

Big Leaf Maple Art

“Appreciate and don't take for granted the things and people you have. Better yet take the good out of the situations you may face, I think 2020 came to teach us that.” -Hopal Green

These Big Leaf Maple trees in our area will grow nowhere else, though people have tried. And they make the largest maple leaf of any other maple. 

These trees are everywhere around us as we meander through the rainforest. They light up the understory in dappled sun, drenching us in golden light.

Their leaves pile up into crumpled papery paths through the woods. They read like naturally self recycling newspapers, littering our way, with the stories of the last few seasons printed on them. Pick one up, it has a message for those who can read tree language. 

There is the news of wind, rain, and sun, gossip about the affairs of birds and squirrels, and from this fall, the tale of the great smoke. We kick through them as we walk.

The rain turns them into soggy cornflakes that squish under your feet.

Here in the great northwest USA, we have boring fall colors. There is green, for evergreen trees, and yellow, for the big leaf maple. That’s about it.

So, in this pandemical moment of embracing what is around, whatever it may be, I take a deep dive into the fall colors anyway. I gather some fallen maple leaves, and play with the color palette. 

I mix them with light on my ipad. 

I begin to pull out bits of dyed fleece and sparkles.

I spin the the colors into yarn, and knit them together.

The main body of the blanket is undyed natural tan brown merino wool, from a small farm near here, where every sheep has a name, and each one is special and loved, and has beautiful fleece. I spin the yarn by hand, from super soft, four inch stapes that I’ve washed carefully and gently, and dried in the sun and breeze.

The finished blanket will remind me of the colors of the season when we all had to learn to appreciate whatever we have around us now, wherever we may be.

“There are so many things which we have but have not paid any attention to them. If only we can learn to appreciate our blessings, we can enjoy great happiness.” -Awdhesh Singh

The Age of Sharing

 The Age of Sharing

“I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.” -Georgia O’Keeffe

(from “How to Do What You Really Want While Saving the World at the Same Time”:)

Some guy claims that “The Artist Is Dead”. He wrote a book. It whines about how you used to be able to make a middle class living at being an artist, but now, because of the internet, (He calls it “Big Tech”) sadly, everything is free. (In truth, he means IF you were a white male fancied by the gatekeepers like the record companies and galleries and rich art collectors and fine arts endowment founders)

Hmmm. I’d say the artist is very much alive. More like, it is the death of the gatekeepers. Now, it is a direct relationship between an artist and the discoverer of the art. It is now, yes, a game of discovery, not selling. A million books a year are self published. There are billions of beautiful photos floating around on the cloud, with millions more added daily.

Kids are making zillions of little movies every minute. More self published songs bubble up on the interweb every day than you could listen to if you played them all day for hundreds of years.

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.”- Dr. Seuss

Some just don’t bother to look for this stuff anymore, and allow the lowest common denominator to feed them cat videos or whatever. But the beauty, creative miracles, and free richness is here now, if you want to look for it.

“The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.”- Neil Gaiman 

“But are they good?” (Scream the unemployed gatekeepers.) “ Are they professional?!” Well if you mean, “not free,” then, no...

“Every artist was first an amateur.”- Ralph Waldo Emerson

New curators will arise to help us sort through it all. Networks will arise to share this creative bounty. It is as if we have been through a long winter where the only flowers you ever saw were in some exotic orchid greenhouse and suddenly spring arrives and the fields and roadsides everywhere are thick with abundant carpets of velvet flowers blooming in every color.

Actually I like the lowly common dandelions. And cat videos. And Etsy crafts. This great blooming of art, from the most basic to the most highbrow, is to be celebrated. But it is time to mentally unhitch art from the cart we have been making it drag around, which is the stated need to make it pay us money.

This is the dawning age of everyone as artist. The age of the gatekeeper is over. You don’t need a degree in art. You might get one to help you understand it, but not to do it. Most of us do not get a degree in talking, or walking, or eating, or singing or lovemaking, though all of these things do require immersion in the culture to learn and do well. There is some technical mastery in involved, but this is no mystic priesthood.  Art is no different.

This is an age in which you can, for the first time since we lived in isolated tribes, just do it and share it with everyone. Only now the tribe is global. You have the whole world in which to look for and find the ones who like the things you do. This is not a problem!  This is awesome!

In the past, you needed to have money if you wanted to be an artist. You needed a patron. Customers, to buy your work. A job on the side at a university to train others that they needed to appreciate and buy your work. A network, a circle, a fan base, a mailing list, a go-fund-me, a spouse or relative to support you.

“Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.”- Oscar Wilde

But now, you can just do it. Yes, the math does not support superstars anymore, especially if we are all artists now. If everyone is either an artist now, or about to realize that they are, there will soon be a one to one relationship of artist to art appreciators, formerly called “consumers.” You will not become a superstar. Nobody will. But do we need superstar eaters? Superstar sleepers? 

Everyone and anyone can and does take photographs all day now. Gradually we are getting better at it as we share. Yes, share. It is a word that means give it away free. Not sell.

You can now turn your photo into a Van Gough, a Picasso, or a Peter Max, in seconds, with an app. Another app composes your tune as you sing it, into a fully orchestrated song in the style of your choice. And what is the limit to how many stars there can be? The more deeply our telescopes peer out into the universe, the more stars we see. Every pinpoint magnifies into a whole galaxy or something.

The age of the superstar is over. It actually peaked decades ago. There is no shared mass media anymore, so no superstars, except for the star of the day, or hour, or... minute? And only among your cohort of shared interest in that subject.

“An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.”-Charles Cooley 

Art is just what we do. It is just who we all are, really. There are still some indigenous cultures left on Earth in which everyone sings. Pretty much all day, often together, in lovely intensely coordinated patterns and harmonies.

Give it up, gatekeepers, you time has passed and you are now historians.

“In any art you’re allowed to steal anything if you can make it better.”- Ernest Hemingway 

“The best reason to paint is that there is no reason to paint.”-Keith Haring

Words Matter

Words Matter

My mother taught me to ignore the mean things people say: “sticks and stones will break your bones, but words will never hurt you”. But it was not true. Words matter.

There was a period in my childhood when I was in the habit of frequently and offhandedly saying, “I’m gonna kill you,” just as a way of casually disagreeing with my friends. “I hate you” was a way of expressing admiration. I knew a teenager who called anything he liked “sick”.

Nowadays I often hear success being described as “killing it”.

How about, let’s not. Even when we know what we mean to say, our subconscious mind hears it differently. This is abundantly illustrated by the bias research showing we make judgements about things we perceive, long before we are even aware we are doing so. 

Who has not had a few words spoken to them that changed the course of their life, encouraged them in a crucial moment, or hurt their feelings so deeply that they rang in their mind for years after?

And our conscious mind is really the tiny tip of the iceberg sticking up above the unconscious waters of our mind. Most of our mind is bopping along on automatic, almost all of the time. This part of the mind is the overwhelming majority, despite the impression, and conceit, really, that you, the Awake One, are in charge, calling the shots. 

And while we are on the subject, could we stop “shooting” each other an email? (Maybe we could chute it.)  We have so many violent expressions, remnants of former times and things we no longer do. Who kills birds with stones these days? Who even wants to?

We disempower girls when we refer to the generic person as a he. We confuse

dark skinned children when we constantly refer to bad things as dark and good things as light.

It takes extra time to compose our thoughts into words that truly are congruent with the meaning we want to express. But it is worth the effort, for we are not only putting forth the enhanced coherent power of these memes to affect those who hear or read our words, we are also reshaping and sharpening our own minds, and clearing the clutter. 

“Whatever words we speak ought to be chosen carefully for those who hear them will be influenced by them, for better or worse.” - Buddha

Mother Sky, Father Earth

Mother Sky, Father Earth

History is full of stories of the “Mother” Earth and the “Father” Sky.  But why do we have to think of it like that?

I do find one story of a Mother Sky and Father Earth, from ancient Egypt, Nuit and her consort Geb. Nuit, the goddess of sky, makes love with Geb, the god of earth, continually, by just lying over him with her infinite blanket-body of stars. Their children grow up to be the famous Osiris and Isis, featured in tales written in stone.

Why not Father Earth?

And Mother Sky?

I mean, if we must sexualize and anthropomorphize everything. Which, by the way, I do not advocate. But if we insist on going there, ok, let us notice that while the dna of men and wimmin is 98% the same, the two percent difference is mostly related to the sexual apparatus involved in making babies. The male contribution is sperm donation, and the female contribution is the egg cell and a nice place for the conceived baby to grow in. Each contributes half of the DNA to the baby.

Of course, one way to look at it is that the Earth is a nice place for a baby species such as ours to be nurtured and grow up. Acknowledged. It is all about us humans with that one. 

But what if the Earth itself, as one body, is the sperm? It contains all of the information needed to grow into the greater being of our destiny once it finds its Cosmic Egg and begins to develop into a post terrestrial being. Hmm, what a conception!

 Or, do we assume that we have already reached the apex of evolution? Oh Goddess, I hope not!

What then, if the Universe is that nice place to grow up into? Did not She give birth to our solar system and galaxy? Did not same Universe do just fine without the humans for billions of years before we came along?

Can we think beyond the blip of time when we Earth humans have been around, back into Great Time? And beyond the tiny sperm of a planet we are on, out into the vast Galactic Ovum or Universal environment in which it has been ejaculated?

If the Universe is self similar “above” as “below,” then each planet-seed is different in terms of the genetic information it carries, according to its adaptation to its particular conditions. Some planet seeds might carry sturdy creatures like polar bear people, bigfoots, stocky Neanderthal types, good at living mostly underground in icy worlds. 

Others might be teeming with elven bird people who perch in great trees on forest planets. 

Herds of horse beings with single central forehead horns and wings may run and fly in rocky grass worlds. 

Somewhere, massive Herbertian sandworms burrow through desert worlds, creating spice prized by spacefaring monkey people. 

Maybe some worlds are full of great telepathic whale super minds who sing to one another from all the way across the water covered planet.

Maybe even this imagines it in a too human centric way. What if most planets find oneness and enlightenment in self realized, whole planet mats of asexual one celled life forms?

One thing is for sure. Stretch out your mind! The story is not over. The love affair between the Mother Universe and her lover and planet creation donor, Father Earth, or WHATEVER it is, is ongoing.

“Humans are the most important entity in the universe …only to most people.” -Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Creepy Hallowen Stories

 “Be afraid... be very afraid.” – The Fly

It is the scary season. Polls say most people are walking around right now with anxiety about the upcoming election. But I am worried about the rest of them. There was a bumper sticker a few years ago, “if you are not outraged, you are not paying attention.” But the attention is just tension now. The outrage is all used up. It has burned to ash.

There is a scary old crone at my house. I caught a glimpse of her at the zoom call to the doctor. She looks like she might be two hundred and forty four years old, at least. She is missing one front tooth, and the other one hurts. She has fallen. Now she lurches about the house with an irregular, halting gait. 

The right leg is weak and painful. The left one is blocked, maybe clotted.

You cannot walk unless your legs, both left and right, cooperate. No progress will happen.

Out front, the pumpkins from the garden are pale, the result of mixing with the seeds from last year’s white pumpkin.

This year’s  jack o’ lanterns will be yellow, like the smoke damaged sky. 

The Concord grapes never quite got blue this year. The birds began to pick them off when they were still a reddish purple, so we had to bring them in.

Night comes too early these days. Every evening of late, Jupiter and Saturn, paired in this October’s skies, peer down over the treetops, into our bathtub, like peeping eyes. 

A heavy, overbearing, hotheaded, red Mars hovers each night, presiding over a heavily damaged moon. An angry red monster stalks the internet. He has been hit; he has been wounded. This is the dangerous kind. The red color is bleeding out of his hair and down into his face. Lies are flying all around him; or maybe those are bats.

Zombies with headphones stagger about the streets, mumbling to themselves. Almost everyone I see seems to be wearing a mask. This year, Halloween just goes on and on.