When I was a child, I dreamed of being a prophetess. I thought nothing could be more worthwhile than hearing directly from God. I did not take into account what things I might hear, or how intensely people are not interested in the messages. Not to mention the arrogance of claiming that what I perceive is more valid than anyone else. All this is true even as this post is actually not about the war here, but rather my own main calling (despite how privileged it is to think about other things now). In children’s stories, it’s always simpler.
For not quite as many years, I felt a terrible urgency to save our familiar, wonderful biosphere. Some years ago the feeling passed. I don’t remember exactly when, but I certainly wrote in my journal that I noticed something felt different. That it’s too late; the matter has been decided. I didn’t say anything about it – what would I have said, and to whom? Since then I’ve been exploring how on the one hand not to close the door to more auspicious possibilities, and on the other hand to acknowledge death on an inconceivable scale.
Walking during the last few glorious winter days of green and birdsong, I felt as if I was simultaneously floating high above, and could see Gaia drawing back a huge bow, slowly and mightily, using the very characteristics that She Herself nurtured, to eventually release and smash us and our civilization to pieces on the solid wall of absence of the needed ecological substrate.
In healthy cultures, humans celebrate and praise the balanced cycles of life and death – in the seasons, in the moon’s waxing and waning, in the quick flicker of day and night, in our own life cycles – that sustain us. Our lives are intertwined with them, and the culture’s best efforts go toward maintaining their balance and experiencing the ecstatic and excruciating fusion with the mystery inherent in them. We have always witnessed cycles larger than us and stood in awe of them. The wondrous cycle of light and darkness, of birth, death and resurrection, of losing and finding our way, and the endless pulse of life’s creative power within all of this, is the theme of most of my songs and texts, my rituals, the essence of my life.
Humanity has always witnessed these cycles, but to witness the end of an era, of a cycle so vast that we have no clue what the next round might contain – that is unprecedented. I understand why there are so many humans on the planet now, why so many of us have incarnated here these days: To take part in this, despite all the pain and suffering. It’s so far beyond me, I don’t know what it means. But my life’s journey is to trust the great Goddess, the great mystery of the infinite rounds of creation and destruction, even when I know She will physically swallow me up along with everything and everyone I know and love. After all, what am I, what are we, if not grains of dust in Her huge kaleidoscope. And within that, somehow, that ultimate pleasure somehow subsumes the immediate agony.
That’s the reason to keep going, listening to Her whispers, doing my best to follow the instructions and asking again and again to be worthy of Her trust. I also learned in quantum physics back in college, that some particles may always pass through an impenetrable wall. Maybe I’ll be privileged to have some influence on those particles that make it through to the other side. I can’t really know, and I don’t need to. Hearing and heeding Her call is the only way of life that makes sense to me in any case. And I’m still working on it, pretty much my whole life.