small choices every day
Today looks especially explosive, so let me get out what I can while I can. I've been sinking into my practice to sustain me: walking for miles, chanting for hours, anchoring my body into the shapes, mudras and mantras that are supportive: Gayatri, Prajna paramita, Asato ma, lots of first and second chakra asanas– it's in me, so I share it back out, serving as vessel, vehicle. I don't know if it helps anyone else, but it's helping me move with and through all that's unfolding.
I didn't want to get out of bed because I was warm, so comfortable. The blankets so soft. Sleep is precious. I've been dragging this sore body through the T-square these past few days. Grand Cardinal Cross perfects today. The past eight years of Chiron in Aries on my ass, directly returned to where it was when I was born. My deepest wound, one of deserving– an existential doubt about being worthy of life. As if I don't deserve to be here, anywhere, to even be a person. The whole of a life spent in trying to excuse myself, stay quiet and disappear or over-perform to be worthy of existence. Feeling that bad, that worthless, that undeserving is a spell, a hex that has felt unbreakable. Whatever anyone has ever said about belonging and deserving, that's fine for them, but it's different for me, it's always been different.
I know I'm not special, no better or worse than anyone. Maybe no one can be convinced of their worth from the outside. It doesn't matter how many times people say your life matters when you see that lives don't matter at all here, only money. Only what's perceived as power, influence. Whoever gets and holds attention, capitalizes on it. This place hasn't been for me. The background frequency never wanted me alive. I was an anomaly and I wasn't the only one, but we were hidden away and kept quiet, spiraling in our own torments out of sight of the mainstream. It's going to be different now.
I didn't want to get out of bed this morning, but I do it anyway. Dry eyelids scraping over cried-out eyes. Here I am, present, showing up for duty. Doing what I said I'd do. The body feels run through with cramps. I would like to hot water bottle and painkiller, crawl back into bed. Why am I having cramps like this again at my old age? I've been bleeding all week. I thought I was done with all that. I've heard rumors that masses of us are bleeding at the same time, suffering with these same cramps because the earth herself is in a rebirthing process, as we all are. Even in our pain, our suffering we're all doing what we can, rising to the challenge, taking on greater responsibility than we feel capable of because that's what's needed now, I can't say why or where it's going, what the outcome will be, it's just what's happening. We need to keep pushing at least for another few weeks. That's what the stars are saying to me.
Maybe everyone looks up and sees a different story. Everyone probably asks for support and guidance and gets a different response. I saw something I've never seen before yesterday. Walking home, the sky filled with crows moving from the west to the east. Maybe you've seen the great flight of crows. Used to be always around sunset, but this was in the mid-afternoon, around 3:00, not dusk. And it wasn't just one wave of crows. I say the sky filled with crows and I mean that the whole sky above me was filled with crows the whole time I walked the length of the cemetery. That means from 24th street all the way to 36th, walking at my slow pace. I can't put it in linear time, but it's significant— not just a minute or two, I'm a slow walker. Fifteen minutes? Twenty? Maybe I'll go back and time it someday.
I wasn't alarmed by the birds, I was grateful to see them and tried to let them know that I could see and hear them, that I appreciated them. What was alarming was the way that the other people walking, the people in their cars, on bikes and scooters, didn't seem to notice at all. I didn't see one of them look up or acknowledge the phenomenon happening above us. You don't hear that? You don't see? What do you think it means? Don't you recognize that as unusual? Why am I the only one aware of this?
Not that last question. I don't ask why me anymore so much because why anyone? Why did that woman get shot in the head the other day on her way to pick up her kid from school? Why has anyone been nabbed off the street or dragged from their home and extradited to a gulag in El Salvador? Why are these so-called leaders and representatives even having conversations about invading Greenland and Mexico? There's no such thing as making sense, none of it makes sense in the old sense-making ways. It makes perfect sense actually, their time is up and at some level they must know it, so they're going scorched earth and trying to destroy as much as possible, getting as much power and money for themselves as they can possibly get on their way out. We've heard them, they don't care about life. They know they are going to die and they don't care what happens to anyone else. Out here trying to defile everything, break everything the way their own poor hearts are already broken.
The crows' message isn't unclear actually, they're painting the sky with suggestions, telling us exactly what we need to do– follow their lead. Crows mob predators. They band together in great flocks to defend and attack. People in Minneapolis barricading their streets have the right idea. The kids in Nepal who overthrew their government in 24 hours also got the memo. Shit has long been fucked up and bullshit, what are we going to do about it today? Barbara Dane sang in 1973, "they call this the land of plenty / and for them, I guess it's true, / for the rich and mighty capitalists, / not for workers like me and you. / What can we do about it? / To these men of power and might, / well I tell you, Mr. Capitalist, we're going to fight fight fight!"
I'm not scared when I look to the sky. I feel excited. The internets are full of fear-mongering at the moment, that totally tracks. Also, we're here, each with our own wisdom and power, not alone, carrying the lessons and medicine of all that's come before us. I'm excited to see what we can do together, what we're already doing, making small transformational choices every day.