Tinderbox Times blog - Day 2

Today is the long-awaited “day after.” There is still no clear winner and some are saying there won’t be until Friday. Possibly longer. I was ready for this.

Meanwhile the astrologists beckon the dawning of the age of Aquarius. We are moving from ground to air, earth to sky, rock to cloud, red to blue.

We are moving from solidity to fluidity, duality to multiplicity, simplicity to complexity. We struggle to evolve, to catch up with the pace of change, and yet, and yet, something is happening. It’s happening all around us.

Today I awoke with hope. Not because I’m certain we’ve rounded the corner on fascism, in the clear and home free. But because given the greatest odds, love is still in the running. Despite all the disinformation, polarisation, intimidation, suppression, oppression and open aggression the people have spoken, are speaking, voices unleashed never to be silenced again.

The curtain’s been pulled back and its clear as a bright blue sky that the emperor has no clothes.

Chicken little feared the sky was falling. The sky. That great, infinite untouchable, ephemeral, undefiled vastness seemed to be dropping, coming closer and closer, and fast.

Little did he know it was merely an acorn. Didn’t matter. He’d made up his mind, started spreading the news and the rest is story-tale history.

In some versions he and all the other animals caught up in the whirlwind get eaten by a fox and in others he escapes. The moral is supposed to be about not believing everything you’re told.

There is something else to the story too. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: he thinks the world is about to end and as a result of that thinking and acting “as if” he gets eaten by a fox. His world DOES end because he follows the path of stupidity.

As I write that sentence I remember my phone call with my Dad last night. I ask him if he has hope. He says if he-who-shall-not-be-named wins then he’ll have lost all hope. That there is no hope in a world with that much stupidity.

It’s always been one of his favourite words, stupidity. As children we were often cautioned against it. That and becoming “un imbécil.”

He taught me to look to the sky for inspiration. To let the beauty of the stars first take my breath away and then guide me. He never said it, but I learnt the lesson, to get perspective look up and go wide. The sky, a place where anything and everything is possible.

As a child when something went wrong I’d tell myself it won’t matter in 100 years. But today I can’t wait that long. I wish nothing would go wrong so it wouldn’t matter today. So that today there would be nothing the matter. But everything matters and this matters most right now.

It’s early evening and dark again. We still have no answers but at least the sky is still there. And there it will stay long after everyone who’s here now is done and gone. Somehow remembering this, instead of bringing cynicism, makes me feel better. Makes things less personal. Equalises everything.

We all just want to be happy. And sometimes our coping mechanisms are a little bit off. Or a big bit. But at least we’re in this together. Maybe things have to get a whole lot worse before they can get better so that we are forced to learn how to talk and listen to one another. How to forge love out of conflict and connection out of alienation.

I’m relaxing into the not knowing and the possibility of how this might change me. And in that changing maybe I’ll let go of all the apocalyptic fantasising which is really just as egoic as idealism.

And then maybe I’ll hope for something more real and then maybe it will happen.

As those older and wiser so often remind me, the world will go on with or without me. Humanity will get through this. That’s not debatable. What’s important to remember is this: that what’s on the other side of now is up to us, and only us.

The sky isn’t falling, never has and never will. It doesn’t really exist anyhow. Not in any real, tangible way. The sky is an illusion, like space and time. A useful concept with no there there.

And yet it can be seen and even felt and it moves us to wonder and in that movement and wonderment we are constantly reborn.