The darkness is fully upon us, and I invite her in so that I can know her more intimately. The darkness is not only in the form of winter, cold, and COVID aloneness, but of human depravity and ignorance in the time of the great unraveling. Our human civilization has wandered far from the path of truth and balance, so very far. Whether we find the path again before the great earth mother lets go of all 8 billion of us, into cosmic memory dust, is far from certain. These are the worst of times – with horrible violence, greed, and separation, of mass species extinction, state sponsored violence and executions, cult worship of humanity’s most ignoble traits.
And, this is also a most precious time, a time of opportunity for profound awakening. The depth of our collective civilizational disease is showing itself. Once a disease is seen and understood, it can be removed or patiently dissolved. The disease is the assault on Mother Earth and all life. It is racial injustice, treaty violations against indigenous peoples and the worship of money instead of love. The disease is the corporate system of power that corrupts governments to the point where they no longer care for the people on the streets. It is ever widening wealth inequality. In the halls of corporate controlled colonial power and patriarchy, there always seems to be more money for war machines and tax breaks for the ultra wealthy, but not enough to keep people fed, housed, and cared for in the middle of the worst pandemic in a century.
Our resource wars and first world economic engines lay waste to the Global South, creating ever greater numbers of refugees dispossessed of their land and dignity, forced to wander from lands blighted by drought, authoritarian dictators, and a climate crisis that is a direct outcome of our blind adherence to a system of violence. The dominant socioeconomic paradigm in today’s world encourages the exploitation of people, animals, and Nature (which is us), so that a few can accumulate obscene wealth. A recent Twitter meme sarcastically suggested replacing the words “the economy” with “rich people’s yacht money”:
How can we respond to COVID without sacrificing rich people’s yacht money?
Saving the environment sounds nice but what about rich people’s yacht money?
Medicare for all would destroy rich people’s yacht money. (Lillie Franks, Writer of Wrongs)
I invite it all in so that I can know this spirit darkness and sit with it, not because I don’t care or have some infantile spiritual fantasy about transcending it. I want to see it so that I can begin to work with it, to surgically operate on it from a place of non-hatred. If I try to push it away without acknowledgement, without seeing it in all its manifestations, it will only continue to poison awareness, perpetuating confused ego-mind that self-references everything instead of dissolving into spacious interrelationship. This tide of darkness can only be purged through the light of clear awareness. The energies and intentions which created this miasma are part of my white European ancestral DNA, my cultural inheritance. But it can be healed. And if you say “No”, “we are doomed”, what part of you that gives up and wants to run away is speaking? What meaning are you embracing with your one brief precious life?
The legacy of our materialistic culture which has created more human made stuff than the weight of all the biomass on the planet as of last week, is doomed. We intuitively know this if we look in the mirror and are honest. Please don’t buy the 20 foot plastic Santa or Disney snowman from your local big box store. Our relatives in the ocean, in the soil are choking on plastic. Our relatives in the sky are choking on toxic gases. Fresh water is rapidly disappearing, gobbled up by factories, feedlots, fracking, commodity futures and other failures of evil F-ery. The time of endless consumerism is about to end. Will we build something else in it’s place, something made of relationships, and great love for the small pleasures and simple beauties of existence? It is only possible to do this in the present moment, but first you have to learn how to live in the eternal now. You can begin, now, with one in breath, and one out breath.
https://vimeo.com/478747682/9c11f942e5