A Glad List for the Apocalypse

Recently a flu the size of Florida descended on our small house and the outer world has been so especially nasty I’ve felt all a mush with woe. Now, I don’t mind mushy woe one bit. But I am an avid apprentice to the mystery of balance and the genuine comfort of a true perspective, which always must include joy. To that end here’s my ur10 list for the apocalypse.

1. Poet David Whyte tells the tale of the warrior Beowulf, called in by King Hrothgar, to save his kingdom from the horrible beast Grendel. For three days and three nights he battled away until finally he vanquished Grendel and saved the kingdom. Everyone partied victorious, went to sleep, and that night Grendel’s mother rose from the deep and slaughtered everyone where they lay. The moral of the tale is that it’s not not your problem you’ve got to worry about, it’s the mother of the problem you’ve got to get at. It’s not Trump or guns or oil or climate change, babes, it’s what created the soil conditions for those things to bloom unchecked.

   

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2. Something in me has always positively connected to change in general, but also, more recently, with the Great Change so the title of this piece is misleading - because when we turn a garden over, we do so that we may plant new seeds. There is great potential joy in tilling the soil, at last, and stopping time wasting trying trying to fix what is beyond fixing and was really just a bunch of experiments anyway.

3. The first year of teenage motherhood I struggled to keep up with my equally teenage friends, none of whom had hitched the wagon of their wayward life to the shooting star of a human child. Whereas they might have ten extra hours in a day I had ten extra minutes. While they flummoxed and flailed away the twin turbines that is attention and time because they were drowning in these, and had no perfect limitation to help them have a felt sense of their natural edges, I had to use my sometimes excruciating awareness of those edges to go way beyond what I would have if I had remained soft and formless, unhardened and not yet blasted apart by a meteor to the womb. The modern world is drowning in meaninglessness and can’t feel the edges of its own inner candle. My joy always feels like it has a candle somewhere deep within it.

4. Any relationship of any true heft in my life got hefty via some Very Difficult Human Shit we went thru together. The challenge demanded so much of us that we didn’t have left over energy to maintain false selves. The rigor was innately truing. I remember accidentally taking way too many shrooms on one fabled Halloween night long ago and just as the donkey’s ears sprouted on the man’s head standing in line in front of my my friend Mo turned to me, stuck out her hand, and said firmly and clearly, “bond to me now.”

5. Nebulae or star nurseries are where things get hot enough for stars to come into existence. Imagine that. Baby stars are actually born. Do you know what would be nice? Grown ups. Real ones, heartfull ones, ones who have soul-rooted integrity that bends but never breaks. But in a world o’er run by pathoadolescents, where can we find true grown ups? Here I want to overuse (in my own work) the “coal makes a diamond metaphor”. But in my boredom at imitating myself, I decided to research how this coal to diamond miracle actually happens. Turns out, it doesn’t. Happen at all. Coal doesn’t make diamonds. It’s too young and too full of plants😱 Diamonds are formed in earth’s mantle and are then “delivered to the surface by a deep-source volcanic eruption.” So, to all us baby-diamond-future-adults, our perfectly timed, deep-source volcanic eruption is here. Time to pony up

   

   So sweaty

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6. When I first watched Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones I didn’t lust, I ached. Not for sweaty him, but for the veracity and mystery of his Quest. And how absolutely imperative his participation was. In many ancient traditions there are predictions of end times, times of great rebirth and renewal. We are in one such prophesied time right this hot human HUMAN moment. A prophesy from the human design/gene key perspective talks about a shift in planetary energies from Cross of Planning (been going on last 400 years, ending now) which is about strategic foresight and deliberate organization and has been a holding energy for consciousness to mature and stabilize. In 2027 we kick into Cross of Sleeping Phoenix which is basically the cosmic gps coming online in humanity. Human Design teacher Kiara Maree describes the new cross as it “sheds outdated paradigms, invites a profound introspection that aligns our inner selves. It calls for a co-creation of a future where the transformative power of collective consciousness takes centre stage, breaking free from conventional boundaries.” I don’t hold much truck by prophecies, not even these, but there is something comforting about attempting to back up enough, tune in enough, and garner a larger perspective, one that reunites my very isolated and very out of Rhythm view, with the innate truth of global and cosmic cycles. There’s a stepping towards a truer music, like leaving a warehouse I’ve been stuck in forever, to follow some strange lute and fiddle sounds emanating from deep within the forest.

7. The Night Janitor tells the story of a man who loved rhythm so much, and also loved people so very much that he started traveling to places where people had lost their rhythm and he would subtly start to change the beat there, in micro ways, like sitting in a cafe, just tapping his foot in a new way, or humming a little more softly and slowly, or stirring a spoon until the energy of the place aligned and snapped back into rhythm and then in larger and larger circles the rhythm reestablished. As he grew, his connection with rhythm grew and his responsibility toward it grew. He started going into scarier and harder to align the broken rhythm places, until finally, a war zone, where he had to go because his story needed him to not just live but also to die on beat. Something in this story makes me ache to live and die in true rhythm.

8. When our little series of mountain villages was wiped out by a recent natural disaster I encountered the people who I want to build a new world with. Plot twist, they were all my neighbors, all everyone’s neighbors, all off couches at last, off phone-shackles and running free, escaped from their isolation chambers and running straight towards the next person to help, to cook for, to connect with. It’s true that some of us are going to have to be dragged out the House of False Comforts in order to reencounter whatever puts us back in rhythm. But there are a lot of us who are finding great pleasure in learning anew to apprentice ourselves to the mystery at the heart of the question, “what does it mean to live in rhythm?”

   

   My daughter Persephone shared this on Due Date day

9. The less false options we have on the table, and that we have to waste our time considering, the better our silly simple hearts can and will Go. Simplicity is a very peaceful thot for me. So much of what I have struggled with has been unnecessary complexity built up as an avoidance of growth. It’s simpler to just open the closet and see what we’re dealing with. It’s so very very very rarely actually a monster.

   

   Except when it is…

10. In Peter Pan, when Peter first flies up to Wendy’s nursery window, what he’s wanting is not a mother, not a night flight buddy either, but someone to sew his damn shadow back on. I look into the world as it is now and see many operating under false terms. The current state of the world is a logically perfect consequence, (consequence is too strong,) let’s go with response (as in call and response) of living outside of a merged state (which is walking in the outer world with an intact and continuous conversing with the inner, which is connected to All). How many people live in rhythm? Or inside of love? Or walk in a merged state? As the dystopian reality crumbles and Rome burns and burns and burns I see you there. Flying up to my window, or me to yours, and we are too light, too untethered to anything true and we are beginning to fade. So we tap on each’s window, and we whisper, (so as not to wake the dog Nanny) “do you happen to have a thimble? Do you know anything about sewing?

    

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    Thanks for reading and for being comrades on the journey

This is how I feel about comments:

In “How Far Away We Are,” Ada Limón writes:

                        I want to give you something, or I want to take
                  something from you. But I want to feel the exchange,
                     the warm hand on the shoulder, the song coming out
                        and the ear holding on to it.

References and notes

I’m using apocalypse in a kind of tongue and cheek way because I like the drama. I have a very hopeful excited heart but I do believe the coming change will have a lot of suffering and difficulty and it is best to be frank about this and the gifts within the difficulty.

This is a fascinating read about diamonds and how they actually happen. https://geology.com/articles/diamonds-from-coal/

A glorious listen to the Night Janitor. I recommend you lay on the ground and listen to it with your heart wide open