Old Man Winter is out there flexing hard. In this usually temperate climate, a brutal winter storm has rumbled down from the North, carried by biting winds that hurl tiny water crystals who are beautiful through the window but sting the face like tiny daggers if you were to be out there exposed to it.
I know people died last night.
There’s an enormous homeless population here, and I was praying for them, feeling them, feeling impotent in the face of their predicament. My thoughts returned again and again to the image of one little cluster of tents on the corner of Hawthorne in front of the bank and across from the ice cream shop: one of those tents has strips torn out of the top. I’ve seen the young man sitting in there with his dog. I kept flashing on the heap of tents and tarps at that crotch where the 84 splits off of the 5 to head out to the Gorge. Then again on the image of that black man in his tiny tent village by MLK Blvd whose clean clothes were hung on a line that he was walking away from with a garment on a hanger in his hand, heading back to his tent by the side of the street to get dressed for the day ahead.
I felt them all as I huddled in the house with my kitty, hearing the low rumble of the central heat and watching the snow tear through the arc of the streetlight in the howling wind through the window. All the ones I’ve seen. All the ones I don’t know how to touch, to support, to be there with or there for. Feeling the structure of the world that holds them where they are and me where I am while four white men sit on top of hundreds of billions of dollars of personal fortune, their only care how to secure and expand it while the rest of the world slides towards food insecurity and destitution. I was feeling tiny and impotent in the face of the staggering scope of entrenched, systematized, violent psychosis that is the reality of human society right now. Feeling the magnitude of it, and feeling utterly small inside of my own struggles and needs, inside of my own journey and my own difficulties.
But I am not impotent.
We are not impotent.
That is not the truth of the reality at all.
That is what the beast of society wants me, wants us to think so that it can continue to eat my light, eat our love, eat the world…. But it is not the truth.
In that moment, when the vista of the hugeness and madness of human society spread out and I felt that impotence rise, when I felt the gilded-cage comfort that it pulled me down into, I gathered myself and reached for my potency. Quietly. I have made great leaps for my strong and wild wings before and frequently had an Icarus moment of extraordinary exaltation followed by plunging again to the ground and lower. So I reached for it quietly this time. With my breath and my attention. In my body. My muscles and my blood, my organs and the stories stored there. I reached with my breath into where the story of impotence lived within me and gently breathed into the power that truly resides within me and is ready for full expression. I found it close, and easily. Just beyond the scope of the idea of impotence, there it was: my potency. My power. Shimmering and seething with life, though unsure how to proceed, it is here, ready and wanting to proceed. Isn’t this how all transformation happens? Isn’t this how anything begins? We feel. We imagine. We breathe and shift our focus. We power up. Then we Do in a new way.
I think a lot about power. I am a profoundly powerful person but I have rarely fully embodied that power, and not yet consistently enough to weave the life of my choosing from it, nor to weave the work of my visions on the world with it. I am in the process of that embodiment now for the first time in my life, and it feels different than I have ever felt before. So I think about this a lot. I tend to this new experience a lot. I study it deeply. I wonder about power: the power we come with and how it gets fed or damaged by how our journey unfolds and the pressures that living visits upon us in great and small ways. I am a student of the power of our Souls, and how that power hungers and strives to manifest the dream and vision written into us by the holy in the time of our creation and preparation for debut into the life of planet Earth. I dream and vision and meditate and journey about all this and more for myself and others, for our holy world and this miraculous planet. I do magic and therapy and medicine work in relation to this in myself and others. I do the work of reclaiming me from all the ways that society and the ordinary evils in the world have gotten their hooks in me, fragmented me, brainwashed me, confused me, violated me, and taken chunks out of me.
Us.
This is the essence of my journey: to embody my power and to help others embody theirs because I know we are more powerful than we realize, I know the mystery can flow through us when we tune ourselves to that and welcome it, I know something new and different and gorgeous is ready to be born in this world and on this planet, and I want to realize that possibility with the whole of my being. You? Do you know it too? Feel into yourself, deeply and beyond thought: feel if that knowing is there in you. When you find it, welcome it to come forward and take a seat at your Council table. You are powerful, in great and/or small ways. Send out an invitation to your deeper Soul power to come forward and sing into your life.
Here’s the song my power sings: I envision a renaissance of humans, humanity, and human society, one that is rooted in and guided by Soul, that brings us home to ourselves, to each other, to all of our kindred here in this glorious garden home of ours, and home to the great Mother Gaia herself. I use the word renaissance to invoke art, beauty, inspiration, and joy, and I envision those enshrined and exalted as the essence of our collective experience. Woven into this vision there is a revolution born of rebellion. The wheel must turn, and there’s going to be a little bit of a fight for that to happen.
But not in the way we’ve grown unfortunately accustomed to, I pray. I envision us rebelling against the now internalized experience of powerlessness, against that internal force that has us walk by the ones on the street in their poverty, turn away from the ones with different skin and their struggles, interrogate the women fleeing, fighting or enduring abuse, condoning the men who abuse, punishing instead of helping, dominating instead of connecting. Should we truly rebel against that intimate oppressor within ourselves, we will become so aligned with and enlivened by our Souls true power that the world will shift and change around us. There will still be points of contention or worse (the old way ain’t dying gracefully, we already see that), but we will be operating in the realm of Magic and bringing the power of entrainment into our endeavor. We will be aligning with the Mystery and how creation moves through us as we do the work of transforming our collective experience for the better here on Earth.
This is a profound step in a different direction, because hostile and/or adversarial rebellion against an enemy whose only language is violence and dominion can (will) lead us straight into becoming a new expression of that which we claim to be vanquishing if we don’t get overrun outright. It happens fast and happens subtle, and then boom: new faces on old demons. Not only that, it can exhaust our magic beyond replenishing. Adversarialism is utterly exhausting. There is a time for violence, a place for the clashing of swords: but let it be a last resort, not a first approach. Let us shift the field of the engagement first. Let us reclaim our Souls true power and re-align ourselves with our own Magic, and take actions that are suffused with that power and guided by Soul and Love in alignment with Creation and the Mystery. I believe in magic because I know it well. It is this power I hope we turn to to fortify and enliven whatever actions and pathways are truly ours to walk in this life.
To look out at the world in these days when so much information is at our fingertips and the laundry list of troubles can seem to stretch on over the horizon can bring us to our knees. Let that falling be a falling into dedication to the deeper truth written within us: let it be a falling at the feet of our own Souls in a rhapsody of courting and a warriors dedication in service to the truth of a greater beauty ready to be born through our lives now.
Let us now, in this most crucial and potent moment, draw our attention down and in to our essential selves with a deep breath and there touch the power that we are woven of, the power of our Souls. Therein lies the key to our own temple and the map to our own part of the story, the part of the answer that is ours to Live with our one wild and holy Life.
It is this power that can meet the reality of the world face-to-face and stand in the magnitude of its gaze without blinking.
It is in this place that our unique response to the magnitude of the times is written and awaiting our attention to be born into wild, beautiful, potent Life. When we touch this power, when we ally with this power, when we say yes to this power within us and let it speak, teach, shape, and guide us, energy shifts and changes around us. A new set of possibilities comes to life. It is a profound act of magic to contact and root into the Soul and let it guide the unfolding of your life and your piece of the great story. It makes waves on the unseen levels that nothing else can. It fundamentally changes the terrain of our shared experience for the better.
And that’s a wonderful thing to know, that we have the ability to have that much influence right here within ourselves. Ready and eager to be born through us.
“We be many and they be few.” The more of us who devote to the path of Soul as a way to walk the odyssey of being alive and engaged with the work and art of transformation in this most extraordinary time, the more the fundamental field of our shared collective experience changes to something more beautiful and life-affirming. So take a deep breath and remember that all the way into your blood and bones, all the way into your viscera. As we look out into the driving snow and feel the restless spirits of all the ones who died in the freezing night of exposure after enduring the indignity of homelessness, let us remember that the power to make the changes needing to be made right now does, indeed, rest within us (though we cannot know how any of that will look as the story unfolds).
We take our place in the Great Turning when come home to the power of our Soul and live out our unique destiny in service to the awakening, healing, and liberation of all Life and this gorgeous planet.
Love,
Maitreya
