Tuesday, December 18, 2012

A beautiful light

I know it's hard to think about beauty right now.  Especially for those of us who live so close to the latest ugliness.  We, these same folks also have connections to 9-11 being less than an hour and a half from the city.

As I started to put this post together in my head, I thought, "Where do I start?".  I can tell you that very beautiful things started coming into my life about 9 years ago when the art came back into this house.  But could I honestly tell you that in the twenty years of living in a wasteland that there was no beauty at all?  No, I can't say that.  Out of 9-11 came the trip to Nightwatch.  I saw the inside and outside of one of the most stunning edifices dedicated to the worship of the Divine, St. John's Cathedral in NY.  There I met young people and their chaperons from Newtown and Sandy Hook.  One dad was an EMT who had been place on-call after 9-11 as all the lower Fairfield County emergency service people had been sent to Manhattan.  Together we learned songs, shared the Holy Eucharist and wandered the gardens.  In the daylight we watched the residents of Harlem sit on the stoop and talk over coffee, sweep their sidewalks and drink in the unusual quiet of the city.  That was 2001.

In 1984 and again in 1985, I was a part of the most beautiful process the Goddess designed, childbirth. My beautiful babies are still beautiful.  So many beautiful moments of their lives thus far; graduations, concerts, plays, snowboarding, dancing, writing, and laughter.  Yes, laughter is such a gorgeous medium we can create with.  And there was the natural art of sunrises, sunsets, waves at the beaches in NJ and FL, flowers naturally growing in some places and planted in others.  To this day I still look forward to the blooming of my Bleeding Heart.

Beauty versus ugly.  Another aspect of the line that has been drawn deeper and deep over the last thirty years.  It is the same people on either side of the line no matter what parameters you give it.  In this case most have chosen their side but there are also those who have been forced to the ugly side.  The powerful wish to maintain the power and the status quo.  It has gotten progressively harder, mainly due to this creation that I am writing on...computers.  Not the first time man has created something that had ramifications that would backfire on the world.  But this time the added feature would benefit man rather than destroy him like the unleashing of the atom.  Those born with a natural affinity for numbers would decide once they figured out how to make the box "think", to teach it how to communicate with other boxes and the humans operating them.  Through this communication explosion we would learn that there were others out there who also had a knack for numbers.  Some would use the force for what has been labeled "evil" but hackers aren't bad.  They are pointing out the weaknesses of the system.  They also shut down the "powerful".  Yes, some of us feel the backlash when our home computers get viruses but we're not the ones hackers are after. We're collateral damage and it is damage I will accept as I am 1) still alive after the fact and can buy a new hard-drive while bitching about losing photos, blog posts, etc. that I was too dumb or lazy to remember to back-up.

It is all this communication and hacking that has the Powerful scared and why they have been working overtime to keep "Us" in check.  It's a hard job that they've been at since the beginning of time.  They know that one day we would figure out how many more of the us there are than of the them. We can overpower them very easily if we all got together and made the plan.  We're doing that now.  And what does the them have to do to slow us down?  Shut down the internet.  In the Middle East, the rebels opted for communication they knew...social networks.  Yes, governments shut them down but not until after the damage was done.  The rebels have been winning in confrontation after confrontation and it is because the mainly young people in their ranks are so communication savvy.

Another form of communication that is gaining momentum is the arts.  There is an emergence of street painters, underground musicians and performers and self-publishing writers.  They are on the side of beauty for sure and have changed my life drastically for the better.  But never forget, all the arts are forms of communication and they speak of the human condition, spirituality and politics.  One of my favorite artists is Mear One.  He is not a favorite of bankers, corporate fat cats or politicians.  He is telling a story of stark truth and calling for rebellion in stunning paintings.

Back to those on the "Ugly" side not there of their own volition but due to the control process.  In the 60's and 70's the psych industry was born.  All of the sudden a damn broke allowing free speech about mental health.  But that opened a floodgate that in the end seems to have done more harm than good. The "warm fuzzies" of "I'm OK-You're OK" were painted thickly over the "cold pricklies" of transactional analysis so we missed the fact that governments and corporations bought into "set them free. We can provide chronically anti-social, emotionally and/or mentally dysfunctional people a "normal" life through the wonderful world of medication.  Except that in the bug bin, there were medical personnel who insured that this folks TOOK those meds regularly.  They could control the environment so these unfortunate folks didn't end up in a room in a boarding house, unemployed, hungry, confused and depressed to the point that not only did they try to take their own life but they thought fire would be a great form of suicide and almost burned the boarding house to the ground.  Mental institutions, no matter how grizzly have been a part of human history for a long time and it's because fellow humans recognized that some people just cannot function in the real world.  Today we'd allow the Marquis d'Sade to wander the streets of Manhattan and assume he had taken his medication and did not have an iron maiden in the basement of his apartment building then be horrified when we learned about all the bodies he'd been dumping in the East River.  At that point we would send the Marquis to a regular prison because no one can commit him to Bellevue for life. For those who don't know, most state facilities had a separate ward for the "criminally insane".  These folks were not put in the regular prison population because doctors knew that that was not safe for other prisoners or prison personnel.  Now we put people who would have resided quietly in facility where they had a pleasant room, activities and monitoring by trained professionals into a prison where anything could set them off, where they are being punished for being sick...they could be beautiful but the system has made them ugly.

Even the Goddess is feeling less than beautiful since Friday.  The skies here have been gray.  The temperature has hovered in the mid-40's.  I can't light my Yule candles outside due to the rain.  The ugly has sucked the joy out of Yule, Christmas and Hanukkah here.  No, "god" did not call those children or the adults home.  It wasn't "their time".  One little girl was a cancer survivor.  Mother had more plans for that child.  No this was a cold act of the Darkness.  It is the ugly trying to control the beautiful with fear...the ugly's greatest weapon.  What's really scary to we Children of the Light is that there are a lot of uglies who believe they are the beautiful and that they speak the message of The Light.  They have deceived many of the beautiful to their camp.  I feel kind of bad when they find out they were working for the wrong side.  It will be too late.  They will be too far gone to join our side.  They will die ugly on so many levels.

The good news is that the beautiful will win.  When the dust settles and the smoke clears we will join together where ever we ended up, covered in dirts, bleeding and exhausted and we will watch the sunrise and be filled with the beauty of Mother's natural art.  The purest art.  The most original art.  Some of us, who still have voices will sing or chant.  Some will clap out a beat.  We along with the fauna will make a joyful noise.  We will welcome the Beautiful Age.  But for now we must stay strong and look hard for the tiny bits of Light especially leading up to the Convergence.  Turn off the TV and the radio.  Stay away from "news" websites. Use you computer or your phone to talk to friends.  Find the Light and the Beauty.  Treasure a snowflake if it falls where you are.  Wade knee-deep into the ocean, raise your arms and praise Mother and Father if you are in warmer climates.  Reach out with your spirit and find the Light.  Stand strong.  BE BEAUTIFUL.

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