Anti-Change-Girl and the Journey of Embracing Change

There is a lot of fear in this world.  It keeps everyone from being who they really are, which is beautiful Love, and glorious Light.  You came to this Earth to experience being the Creator of your own reality, to embrace what it means to choose to evolve as a unique and special individual.  

The fear we are all exposed to comes from the uncertainty of this time.  It isn’t a time like any other.  Some compare it to the fall of the Roman Empire, but it really isn’t comparable, because the Roman Empire didn’t completely rely on a finite energy source which was quickly disappearing, like we do.  Their world didn’t have roughly seven billion people on it, either.  So, from my understanding of history, we are experiencing something that has never been experienced before.  Just like every one of us, this situation is unique.

The essence of 2012 is the summation of this uncertainty.  We have all heard talk of Mayan and Zuni prophecies, of the End of the World, and of Extraterrestrial Disclosure.  There is a tremendous amount of fear circling these predictions, and what was but a joking whisper of conspiracy theories has become a rather loud cacophony of differing opinions, disbelief in some, belief in others, and fear abounding.

Out of this noise I keep hearing and reading and hoping and fearing, the only thing that seems to calm my heart and soul is the idea of a massive conscious shift in awareness that we, the human species, must change and embrace drastic change to survive the consequences of our collective actions.  We all live on planet Earth, and most of us would like to keep living here, which means things have got to change.

Change is a scary thing for most people; no one really likes the initial resistance that change brings to your life, so most folks try to avoid it, and then in avoiding it, most lose the ability to control the change.  By not embracing and allowing change to come into your life, and by not changing how you think about and identify with change, it has been my experience that change winds up controlling you.  What I mean by this is difficult to communicate in words.  I will paint a picture.

Once upon a time there was a girl who was forced to move to Canada by her Evil-Parents.  Her Evil-Parents had made a decision about her life, without consulting her, that they would move to Canada in the hopes of pursuing a better, more successful and bountiful future.  No one seemed to give a rats ass about what the little girl wanted, and shrugged off her vocalized hurt by saying repeatedly that the “change would be good for her in the long run.”  Huh, whatever that meant. to Anti-Change Girl, that was a death sentence, because life in her perspective was more about playing and less about years passing than it was for her more wizened parents.  

Anti-Change-Girl decided she would be aggressive and rude in approaching this change of place and experience.  She resisted it by placing a massive flag of her native nation outside her window.  She protested by screaming “America is better than Canada!” while biking around her neighborhood.  She got into fisticuffs with boys who called her a boy, and not a tomboy (there is a distinct difference, you know), and she refused to wear dresses like the Canada-girls and would pack jeans in her knapsack daily to prevent the enforcement of dress-attire on her by her evil mother, who apparently wanted Anti-Change-Girl to be prissy and Canadian.

Time passed, and Anti-Change-Girl found her niche, like most animals do.  She was an artistic tomboy who loved nature who sought to extend kindness wherever she went.  Most people didn’t really know what to do with her, but she had friends, and wound up loving Canada.  One day, her Evil Parents decided to change her life without consulting her, and moved back to the United States.  Anti-Change-Girl had to try to fit in once more in a now foreign native home.  Her “evil” parents had been right in the beginning, when they believed Canada would be good for her, she just didn’t see it until much later, when she recognized that a different nation brought to her the awareness that global diversity is beautiful.

What sparked this altercation in how Anti-Change-Girl views change was the acceptance of Change being the only constant in life.  It was the initial change of moving to a separate country, unique in it’s culture and systems, and then returning to her native land, which caused Anti-Change-Girl to be the different entity she is today, and which will enable Anti-Change-Girl to be more adaptable to the changes facing her and her species.  She had no understanding of this long-time-comprehension as a child, for she had no past to go by and to learn from.

Change is inevitable.  It is why you choose to be here, now.  The only thing you can control is how you think about your reality.  From that thought comes the allowance of the thought being born into material reality, and the allowance guides you to take the actions necessary to create what it is you wish to create in this existence of yours. You are here to be a Creator, are you not?  Anti-Change-Girl needed to alter her understanding of the change of moving, and it took her many decades to do so.  She wound up seeing it as a tremendous learning experience that shaped nearly every aspect of her identity. 

By embracing change as inevitable, and by allowing change into your life to make the life you wish to make, the fear of uncertainty dissipates.  This is what the “mass consciousness shift” is on about, but it all begins with the individual, and grows into the greater human consciousness, and ultimately changes the world, and how the world is experienced by the individual.  

It boils down to how you wish to experience this moment of Now: Do you want to see the Change that you are experiencing in your life as, “Yet another experience where someone is taking advantage of you?”  Do you want to experience change as, “Yet another horrible Trauma that winds up with you as the Victim?”  That will only keep you in a state of victim, continuing to live your past-experience, never moving beyond them.  To move past the hurt and the trauma, the death, and the change, you must see that how you think about those experiences shape how you respond to them.  If you think of an ending as a negative, you will never see the ending as a new beginning! 

How you choose to see yourself shapes your reality.  If you hate how you look, how you feel, and where you are, you will create more hatred, not less.  You will resist change, not embrace it.  You must begin to love and accept yourself, and accept the changes you are now experiencing as inevitable aspects of the human condition.  You are Love manifest in Material form, and to be the change you wish to be in this life, you must accept yourself, and accept the changes not with negativity, but with hope in growth towards a new beginning.

A Wise Shaman once told me that the highest form of Creation is first to think it, then to speak it, then to sing it, and finally, to dance it into being.  What will you dance into being today?

When A Tree Falls

When a tree falls in a forest, does anyone care?
Does anyone give a shit, about a tree?

All I have, all that I am, was given to me, by the planet I stand upon, and by Her trees. The green life. Every cell in my body, well, almost every cell, carries a small organ whose roots can be traced to some of the first beings on this planet which derived their energy from the sun. Via endosymbiosis, that purple photosynthetic bacterium became the mitochondria which were inevitably given to me by my mother, who got them from her mother, all the way back to the first female Homo sapiens.

Can you see the connection? Can you see the link?
The chain of evolutionary history traces my very existence back to photosynthesizing organisms, light-eaters, making me somewhat “one” with all present green life, albeit vaguely. The Matriarch of All I know, all I can touch and experience as life, or that which was once alive, is this planet. This Earth, and her wondrous biosphere.

I owe her everything. She gave me my breath. She gave me my energy. I cannot see Earth as anything but Mother, feminine and holy, sacred and patient. I cannot fathom a lifeless sphere, I cannot tolerate matter without nonmaterial substance. It makes no sense to me, to see a world with no soul, a planet with no heart.

I am a virus on her back, a solitary virus in a sea of human-plaque, our square-like brick ever breeding, always consuming. Consuming is all I do. I am not chloroplast-life, I am mitochondrial-life, and I eat and use and ingest that which is before me. Me, and my seven billion brothers and sisters.

I am a virus who woke up and realized I no longer want to be a virus. I no longer want to thrive on the back of my host, sucking life from her and the species which represent her whole. Don’t they have a voice, too? Don’t they have a say as to what us pink viral primates do with each and every breath that the forest, the green life, more or less, gave to us in billions of years of experience?

If it were me, and I was in the position of Gaia, I would kill us all. I would terminate all life, and let the biosphere begin anew, or close to new. But she won’t be doing the killing, our ever-patient Mother, no, we will be doing it. We will choke on our own filth. We will kill an atmosphere that took three billion years to form. For what, exactly, for money? For power? For the primate-driven need to be Alpha?

Where does patience come into our genes, where do we find a place in our human hearts to stop this maddening consumption and embrace symbiosis?

I don’t think it will ever happen. It isn’t because I am a pessimist. It isn’t because I am depressed. I am those things at times, but I am more often seeking the silver lining than many believe, because I am still alive. I haven’t done myself in, and I do think of it, with all the sorrow I know I create. My house is warmed by ancient sunlight, taken from the Dakotas, the raped hole filled with toxic waste, like semen left in a victim after rape. My isolated life in the mountains exists, all because of ancient sunlight, removed rather impatiently by my need for a warm belly, a warm plate, a warm bed.

All of this is my fault. Not mine alone, no, but for my part, I know. I know I have built structures out of trees that are older than I can comprehend in my pitiful +/-80 year lifespan. I know I fueled up my vehicle with gulf oil after the Deepwater Disaster. I know I eat the shrimp which should be feeding other mammals. I know, and I carry that knowing none too easily.

This knowing keeps me up at night. I can’t get to bed without distraction, and I am addicted to distraction because it keeps me from leaving sooner than my loved ones would like. I cannot do that to them, they love me so much. It would be unfair to my Mother, who links me to this cycle of giving and patience that I can barely comprehend.

So, when a tree falls in a forest, do you give a damn? I know you don’t, nor do I. You wipe your ass with redwood just like most of us. You pick the mucus out of your nose and smear it on a Kleenex, not caring if that Kleenex was once a tree a thousand years old. After all, trees have no feelings. Trees don’t weep when they are cut down. They don’t lash out and smite you as they are toppled by your machines. Hell, matter has no feeling, no conscience, according to the Darwin-world we have all adhered to. We live each day like this, believing a rock carries no worth, aside from it’s usable ore. It is the religion of our era, to see all matter as void of magic, unless of course, that matter is human.

Community

There’s a lot on my mind lately, and these thoughts have been hindering my creative capacities.
As it has taken so long to get to the stories I’ve been working on, and to post them here, I have decided to just do a little bit of streaming consciousness writing here, to allow myself to become better understood, and to also bring light to the fact that creativity often does not allow itself to be hindered by a set schedule. Oftentimes, creation happens all at once, and sometimes it trickles out of the creator slowly. This kind of activity is universal, and you can see it each time you step outside into Nature. Geographical processes can take millions of years, or minutes.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the topic of community. According to The New Shorter Oxford Dictionary, which is a much better resource than the Macintosh or a free internet dictionary, the word is defined as such:

community
I. A body of individuals. 1. The commons as opp. to peers etc.; the common people. 2. An organized political, municipal, or social body; a body of people living in the same locality; a body of people having religion, profession, etc., in common; a body of nations unified by common interests (freq. w. cap. initial, in the title of an international organization). b. The members of such a body collectively. 3. A monastic, socialistic, etc., body of people living together and holding goods in common. 4. A group of animals etc. living or acting together; Ecol. a group of interdependent plants or animals growing or living together in natural conditions or inhabiting a specified locality.
II. A quality or state. 5. The state of being shared or held in common; joint ownership or liability. 6. (A) common character; (an) agreement; (an) identity. 7. Social intercourse; communion; fellowship, sense of common identity. 8. Commonness, ordinary
“Community.” Def. la. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. 1993. Print.

I feel this particular word is evolving a new meaning, which is the topic of my blog post today. I will return to the more entertaining stories shortly, which have been delayed due to research.

Community implies locality, but with our global interconnectedness brought upon us because of technological advancement, this particular definition of a localized meaning of community must be re-understood.

Perhaps because we are all living on one planet, that is our new definition of community. I have moved to a location where I have chosen a minimal interconnectedness with my peers because I have chosen to work on myself and not my relationships with others outside of myself. This choice defines community. I am in communion and walk a common ground with my Self. I am working to seek love inside of me to further my love with those outside of me, first starting with my partner, Beth. If I can learn to love myself and get to know myself, then I will always have a localized community, and this community will never be tainted by the needs outside of Self. The community of One will follow me everywhere. This is why it is so crucial to look within and to work with the inner self and learn to love yourself and forgive yourself of your faults: if you don’t have yourself, you have no community. After all, the only member of your community who will be guaranteed to be there for you every step of life and even when you die is yourself.

I see so much consternation about the lack of community in our American culture, and how that its absence is the “root of all evil,” and “why we are in the mess we’re in.” Many people blame a lack of community for most of our societal problems. Although I think there is something to be said about this particular lament, I feel it is a skin-deep complaint to a much deeper concern.

The lack of community is ultimately a general lack of forgiveness and extension of love to all aspects of the individual self. The self is a perfect extension of the All: the self is dark, light, grey, evil, hateful, spiteful, compassionate, loving, giving, all at once. We experience this, and some choose to not acknowledge their “Shadow Self,” or as Tori Amos so aptly defines as our “Dark Prince.” Those individuals who deny their darker self do themselves and their communities a great disservice, because the “Dark Prince” is there, and won’t really ever go away. It is lurking in the subconscious, waiting for a chance to get out; to be noticed, even in a moment. Usually, if it goes unacknowledged, it is left unchecked and misunderstood, and manifests itself in the life of the individual in manners which are all too often harmful to that individual, as well as that individuals’ loved ones. The cycle of abuse could be defined as the acting out of the abandoned shadow self, demanding attention by harming those who are closest to the individual inflicting the abuse.

Community seems to lack the definition of the Community of Self. It also seems to lack the more broad definition of members having something in common with others globally. We are an interconnected species, thanks to the Internet. Most of my members of community live hours away, and in many cases, states away. This distance is shortened in an instant with the aid of social networking tools like Facebook. Sure, we all mock Facebook, and I would agree that it isn’t used to it’s full potential, but Facebook pulls many members of a community together, albeit in a manner which hasn’t evolved as fast as it could.

I’d love to see Facebook used for idea exchange, and conversation that allows many people to put in their ideas and hopes, and dark sides, too. It seems that positivity on Facebook is honored, and negativity is condemned, save for the ‘blackish-grey’ exception: complaint, which is prevalent on Facebook walls, and most American conversations.

Perhaps the reason why Facebook is so poor a social tool is because it isn’t allowed to let out the Dark Princes on the Wall? The inner darkness isn’t given a voice on Facebook, and so for the most part, the sense of community lacks there, as well as in real life. Which brings us back to our little dilemma of self.

Everyone would have community, all the time, and be able to be in the state of communion, all the time, if they would learn to get to know their whole selves. Most people don’t take the time, and so far, I’ve seen a whole lot of hiding and defining self as whatever the Self “does,” rather than what the Self chooses “to be.” It’s a difference of verbs. Etre is the French verb meaning, “To be.” The French have an entirely separate word for the act of doing something: Faire. We English speaking North Americans seem to use both being and doing interchangeably. One of the first things people ask you is, “What do you do?” As if the act of doing defines who you are Being. Well, it doesn’t. Just because someone works in a successful occupation as an engineer doesn’t mean that person is successful at Being who they really are.

I observe a lot of hiding in my culture. I even experience a lot of others redefining self as “what you do.” Shakespeare had something going for him when he said, “To be or not to be, that is the question.” It really is the question! The answer to our lack of community is there, hidden between the lines of that little phrase. If an individual chooses to take ten minutes a day and stare at their naked self in a mirror, and try to accept all the darkness, as well as the light and grey, they just might wind up being able to feel more balanced and whole, and actually truly give back to their loved ones, rather than hide from the shadow self and abuse those around them. They might even be able to get to Be whatever it is they came here to experience Being!