SPRING TUNING

I haven’t written anything for almost a month.  There are ideas that pop up here and there like the dandelions popping up in my garden right now, but I failed to write them down and when I don’t they fade back into the same shadowy corner where I keep the “will use this sometime” clutter in my mental basement.  Not yet getting around to doing taxes is another sign of avoidance.  I’m just not ready yet. What is really going on?  I feel intuitively that I’m trying to collect energy around something in order to surge into something new with laser focus but what that might be is eluding me. 

Spring in El Prado by White Deer Song

We will be making another trip to Arizona in a couple of weeks.  We both feel that we are supposed to be there at this time but haven’t yet found a way to make it happen long term.  Since giving up the little Cottonwood cottage, along with all our furniture, we haven’t had enough green resources to start again.  In the meantime, PQ needs to be at that lower altitude more than ever. He is coasting right now.  Here and there, I get the urge to interfere and confront him with the need to make a decision about preparing for a lung transplant and then something stops me. Now and then he will say something like, “I’m waiting for a sign that I’m getting better or worse.”  Actually, he is gradually getting worse.  I notice that he runs out of wind more easily doing small things now, and each time we return to Taos from Arizona it takes longer for him to adjust.  We seem to live quietly in our monkey-mind morning coffee on the patio and, “do you want to go to up to Seco for lunch and then pick up the mail” world. However, I notice small changes that are adding up to pretty big.  Maybe we humans love these little habits because they assure us that our world is familiar when it’s actually full of blind corners.

Spring is a new start for an old theme.  After a winter of hiding underground, plants begin to pop to the surface, the leaves bud out, butterflies escape their cocoons and birds chirp their love songs.  Life is never perfect but in the spring, we all want to do life better than we did last year. It’s about a new beginning, but the seeds for this year’s garden are the product of last year’s fruit.  This is the dilemma we all face when trying to get a new lease on life. 

What if time is an illusion and everything is always now, it’s just that we can only see little bits at each viewing and within one lifetime.  Not a new idea, I know, but its having a new effect on me and maybe, just maybe that’s where a new beginning really exists.  It may be that this Mayan 2012 idea is ultimately about cosmic spring, and of course, winter comes before spring so there may be some cold grey times before any fresh outlook is even possible. 

 Actually, I don’t believe previous history or planetary karma will disappear even if we blow ourselves into the stratosphere.  Although there always is this hope/fear that we will get the messy slate cleaned by cosmic forces, I don’t think there is anything in history to support this hope. Revolutions begin with enthusiasm for a pure new start and end up falling into the same pattern as the previous regime and frequently worse. Simply wiping the slate clean only means that we will soon write all over it with the familiar design embedded in our species’ memory.

Maybe genetics provides the best metaphor for hope.  A species maintains a certain genetic pattern for ions and yet every now and then there is a small mutation in the mitochondrial DNA that may make a creature better adapted to changing conditions but sometimes less adapted in which case this alteration tends to extinct itself. It seems to me that consciousness has a similar progression.  Changes are minute and sometimes undetectable in the beginning but those better adapted to the greater picture gradually become stronger. Learning to recognize the potential of those small changes is possibly the biggest challenge.  

Spring is here again and each of the plants in our garden are little different than they were last year.  Some didn’t survive winter, some have spread and flourished, some found a new location that they like better than where I planted them. The Starlings in our bathroom air vent quit leaving in the winter two years ago and are now permanent residents.  PQ talks to them when we have our morning coffee and they answer back.  Has anyone really studied them?  Their repertoire of calls, chirps and gurgles is awesome. We humans are so homo-centric that we seldom consider how other beings might see this world we share or if it intersects with lives on any other dimension. After all, we might not have the biological equipment to venture beyond our species borders but imagination isn't so limited.

Consider stepping off the cliff of reason and its pretense of security and find out where the winds will take you.  This is what happened when your ancestral DNA mutated again and again and again over many cosmic springs.  That's how you got here and its the only way you'll get anywhere else.