I was coming up the back stairs when the weather turned on a dime. The sunny spring day became overcast and a swirling wind began to whip. As I was climbing the stairs, Lyra, my 17 year old goddess daughter, called out the backdoor “Deborah, is that you? I think today is the Apocalypse!” At that moment, with the sudden shift in the air, and the darkening of the sky, it felt like she was right, that something had begun. I’d had a rollercoaster of a day after a night of bad dreams. I’d mediated a hostile interaction with officemates. I’d worked hard to stay breathing amidst the peculiar nasty intensity of therapists going at each other. I’d had a long conversation with a friend about painful shifts in our friendship circle and magical fallouts. I’d listened to several upsetting messages on my voicemail. I’d worked with two grieving clients. And then, walking to the bank, I broke down sobbing in front of Global Exchange’s window installation which happened to be an altar to Marla. I wouldn’t have been surprised to have the day end with the beginning of the Apocalypse, or a small earthquake.
The Apocalypse. I yelled down to Patti, repeating what Lyra had said, and she, not missing a beat, said; “Well, it is the End Times!” The End Times, the Apocalypse, Armageddon, the Rapture. This story is packing a lot of punch, feeling closer, more possible and probable then ever. My friend Patrick was over thursday night and he told me how he’d been walking thru our neighborhood and turned a corner and was suddenly in the midst of a outdoor revival. A Latino preacher was ranting in front of a painted canvas of
Patrick is a longtime activist who several years ago started a group called “Smartmeme”. A meme as I understand it is like an idea, a story, a soundbite, that then affects other ideas. The Apocalypse is a meme. Smartmeme attempts to teach, train, and educate people on strategies to devoke the Apocalypse. Direct action at the point of assumption is one of their provocative memes. Changing consciousness at will is the whole point of Smartmeme. They are some of most skilled magical activists I know, and are involved in a variety of campaigns for social and environmental justice. I’ve heard Patrick often say, “its not the story of the battle, it’s the battle of the story”. They are finely attuned to the stories being spun, and are battling to insert twists and turns that serve the life force.
Patrick told me he’d recently heard there was going to be some big gathering of “elders”, endorsed by the Dalai Lama, funded by Paul Neuman, who all saw something big and terrible coming. The gathering’s purpose is to pass on wisdom to a group of young people. These young people are tapped to survive the terribleness and pass on the wisdom of the earth’s elders into the future. This isn’t confirmed yet, it could be a postmodern myth, but it is a meme of these times. A powerful meme. It’s confusing whether to work furiously on devoking this meme, or to get to it on figuring out how to get my son on the roster of young people who will survive.
Mostly hearing this story, I want to get Christopher Guest involved in it and to create a movie about it in the manner of Best in Show. I know too much about elders and the posturing that goes on in spiritual communities. Any gathering like this will actually be pretty hilarious, and cantankerous. The whole council of elders is a meme that we white people glamorize and romanticize, especially if the elders aren’t white. Imagine the politics of such a gathering! Maybe this will be the gathering that brings on the Apocalypse full force! Magically, it seems rather challenging to call such a gathering together, isn’t it in it’s way an invocation? I’d rather see these elders called together to heartstorm another narrative, create another meme.
Lyra continues to say she feels a shift in the texture of reality, that the Apocalypse has begun. Maybe she’s right. Maybe it began years back, and has been moving in slow motion, a motion which is gradually picking up speed. I find myself sitting with paradox more than ever, calling up the Temperance cup in the tarot. In this cup I hold the Apocalypse, the facing up to that the end times are upon us. In this cup I devoke the Apocalypse, giving it no energy, imagining the future. Holding these two cups at the same time, blending them, holding them as one thought, drinking them in. What a time it is!!!!
3 comments:
The apocalypse has no beginning, other than in our actions towards each other and the planet; to that extent, I wonder how anyone can define the commencement of the end. By what do we judge, when this world has already seen the scourings of Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler, Stalin, Dubya and Mugabe? The oppressions of civil liberties, the continual and unnecessary starvation of the world's poor, the destruction of entire species going back to the Dodo and way, way before that...
Did we ponder the End Times when we killed the last mammoth? Did we consider the end was nigh when our's and other people's fathers and grandfathers, mothers and grandmothers, uncles and aunts, were dying in the gas chambers?
Perhaps some have always thought the end was nigh. Perhaps, particularly for those of a Judeo-Islamic-Christian bent, some have needed to focus on an ending in order to get through the day, the hour, the night. In truth, I think it is only now, the moment we are breathing in, here in 2005, that we can see an ending of sorts. We can recognise that the world which is dependent upon plastics, antibiotics, the supremacy of the dollar, is coming to an end. Oil production could peak as early as next year and will certainly peak soon, leading to a steady decline year on year as anything made from oil or running on oil becomes more and more expensive. Wars will be fought to secure access to the remaining oil fields - cue Iraq, cue Afghanistan. By 2020, a report commissioned by Bush's own government has declared that the decimation of natural resources and resultant chaos is a bigger threat to the world than terrorism, with vast areas of land reshaped by floods and countries eventually going to war simply to maintain their borders in order to try to feed their own peoples. We read that one explosive volcanic action, either in Yellowstone or the Canary Islands, both well overdue for these eruptions, will spell, at the very least, destruction for half the US and, at worst, extinction for the majority of species on earth.
This blanket disaster scenario isn't fictional. We can read of it happening time and again in the stones themselves, the fossil record. It calls to us to stop being so presumptive, so arrogant as regards our perceived unique place in the scheme of things. We are custodians, carers - not owners. Millions and millions of years before the dinosaurs came to their end - which is still only explained by theories, not facts - this planet saw a 95 per cent loss of life. This was the point at which one of the Earth's most successful species, the trilobytes - I call them underwater woodlice, that's what they looked like - ended their successful dominion over the seas. It is said vast amounts of methane were released into the oceans by volcanic activity, literally turning them toxic.
We were not around to blame ourselves or to carry any blame. We were not around to theorise, to try to prevent it or to simply ignore it. Our chance to make things work n this planet had not yet come to pass and would not come to pass for many multi-millions of years.
And our time here has yet been but a blink of Gaia's eye. The entirety of human history is but a passing shadow over the earth's vast directory of comings and goings. Should we despair? Perhaps as a species, we have less going for us in the long-term than the dinosaurs, which were around for so much longer. But then, there are those of us for whom nature is its own reward, whether we are here to observe its intricacies or not; there are those of us who believe in such things as reincarnation, the opportunity to learn and learn and learn until we get things right, from lifetime to lifetime.
I think the soul's journey takes many lives. It learns slowly, sometimes taking entire lifetimes to draw conclusions, to take on board certain cosmic facts and ideas. I do believe we are approaching the end of a destructive, wanton, arrogant era. I believe many will die but those who remain will face the challenge of approaching the earth's remaining resources in a more inventive, less abrasive manner. We must rediscover the uses of plants in medicine on a much bigger scale than they are used today, for that time when antibiotics prove useless, less than ten years away, or so we are told; we must prepare for lives lived without access to plastics. We must ask ourselves, what would that mean? How would I cope? What would I do?
Some won't want to live in that newly emergent, devastated but still living world. Some would rather die than lose the 'modern' existence. Me, I'm game for a challenge. We're hard-wired to adapt, to fight, to learn. Anything less is to cheat our heritage. We owe it to the dinosaurs to give it our best shot. And to our own dead.
Much love, A x
PS Excuse any typos, please. It's first thing Sunday morning here in London - a beautiful, sunny time - and your latest posting opened my mind up to things far too early in the day. Big thoughts are probably best chewed over after a lovely lunch in the company of fabulous people. :-)
IMHO there is no such thing as the apocalypse.
There are only shifts in the energy field – in many respects death is not an end, and life is not a beginning.
In attempting to encompass the often-painful changes in life and being ALIVE, people see an end, or seek to bring about an end. Living is one of the most beautiful, painful, dancing struggles we undertake. Every breath is a struggle for emergence.
I hope I’m not cutting to close to the bone if I personally consider the cry of apocalypse to be the same thing as a suicide note.
I also meant to say -
I'm really sorry that you had such a crappy day.
Much love and many huggs. xxxxxxx
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