Lost World

Greetings all,

I hope you are keeping well in your isolation.  I have my up times and down times.  This past week has been more down for me.  It is just beginning to sink in how long this may go on for, and what that means for my life and for the lives of so many others.

I like many folks out there am feeling a profound sense of grief and loss.  It is the loss of the world I knew.  The loss of normal is profoundly disturbing to me.  I find this odd because normal was not working for me.  I know I am not alone in this especially here in the States.  Normal pretty much gave us this pandemic.  It prioritized profits over life.  It normalized politicians holding citizen's basic needs hostage to play power games.  It celebrated cruelty and racism.  It devalued the people that actually keep the economy and the people of our society alive.  It was a world that was all about constant consumption, productivity, and environmental depredation.  We were literally pillaging the future to pay for the present.

So if it was so horrible why are we mourning its loss?  Well it is what we knew, and because it is all most of us knew it feels like a part of us has been ripped away.  It also bears a striking similarity to being in a toxic relationship.  It was a hard lesson to learn that even when I left a relationship that was abusive and toxic I sometimes still missed the person. Missing them didn't mean I was wrong about leaving.  I think what is going on right now is we are missing our relationship with our toxic society, even though it wasn't good for us and was slowly (or in some cases not so slowly) killing us. Still even for those of us who wanted massive societal change, we are just as upset as those content with the status quo.  There is so much uncertainty right now.  We know the world is changing but we don't know where the new path is taking us.  Human beings don't like uncertainty, we do just about anything to avoid it.

I think beyond all of the habituation we miss what we thought of as ourselves and our place in the world, even if the place sucked.  We knew where we were, who we were, and had a reasonable idea of where we were going.  We miss the idea of our lives, and the shapes that it filled in our days.  So many of our distractions are gone right now.  Work, socializing, and shopping being the foremost in those distractions. When I complained to one of my guides how lonely I was feeling they reminded me that I had been lonely most of my life.  When I  pointed out that before the pandemic I could at least go out to the movies or a store, they said, "You are confusing commerce with connection."  They also pointed out that I am not alone in this confusion.

Why am I telling you this?  Well I am quite sure many of you have reached the stage where you are uncertain what shape the new world will take as the old world passes away.  Make no mistake there will be no going back to what was before.  Too many people have paid with their lives for that to happen.  The world of humanity has stopped in a way it hasn't for quite some time.  Many people are questioning whether we should keep things going in the same direction when we start this locomotion back up, or whether we should lay new tracks.

So how about you?  Are you grieving the lost world?  Are you apprehensive of what form the new world will take?  Do you find yourself questioning your goals and where you want to go next?  Do you feel unmoored lost in a sea of shadowy prospects?  Well that's where most of us are.  It's ok to not know where this is going and where you will fit into the overall picture.  For now allow yourself to grieve the world that was.  Let out the tears, make allies of your fears.  Once you have done that take stock of the beauty that remains in the world and in yourself.

Peace and Blessings,
Thomas Mooneagle

Striking a Balance

Greetings all,

I hope you and your loved ones are staying safe.  I have been more vocal as of late, but have been doing live casts on Facebook in order to air my thoughts.  Some lovely lady made the meme of something I said and thus the picture here at the top.  The sad thing is that this is what people will see on my professional page when they click on the blog link.  Still if they want fake love and light sentiments I am probably not the professional for them.  When I love you, it's more than just a surface emotion.

So let us take stock. We are in the middle of history.  Technically we always are, but only sometimes are we aware of it.  I have found it hard to remain stable and centered in the past few weeks.  The first  week when I was laid off (temporarily...most likely) from one of my teaching jobs I was not able to do much of anything.  I have rebounded a little, but some days I just drift through the day.  Social media has been both a blessing and a curse in this time.  It keeps me able to chat with many friends, but also I see the horrors again and again in the newsfeeds.

Hope is important, but I also feel like right now people are misusing it to try and not feel the grief of what we are going through.  People are dying and more will die yet.  The social fabric of our lives has  been torn asunder.  Here in the U.S. we have been given a hard lesson of just how vulnerable the majority of us are to disaster, and how little our representatives and leaders have our backs.  The lie of the land is that we are a place of opportunity,  I have seen three different responses one on the white lighter end of the spectrum and the other being on the conspiracy theory end of things.  Then there are those who are in denial.

So on the white light side of things you have folks saying this is all part of the plan of ascension and transformation.  We're going to be entering some kind of Golden Age where everyone stops being dicks, and loves one another.  For a Golden Age it sure is starting off with a lot of greed and blood.  Now I do think that this is a turning point in history, but I don't think the outcome is set in stone.  Will we change our ways and how we organize our society to take care of our brothers and sisters?  Will we begin to let the Earth heal?  I hope so, but if we do it will take collective action not just prayer and affirmations.  We have to be willing to face where we've allowed our own selfishness and apathy to contribute to the calamities of the world. We also have to be willing to change our own behavior and expectations.  Everything is not going to be alright, some people are going to lose that which they love the most for whatever world emerges out of this.  If we want to honor them and give that loss meaning, then we best be willing to act and hold people accountable.  Like it says in the meme, "Love and Light are not condoms."  They don't protect us from our own actions or inactions.

Now on the other side of this we have the doomsayers.  The illuminati preachers, the 5G apocalypsers, and the anti-vaxxer syndicate.  I will say this.  Conspiracies aren't that intricate, all you have to do is follow the money.  Really the culprits for this abominable response to a global crisis are not hard to spot.  I don't need to name them, if you can't figure out who they are you're not smart enough to understand this post.  I realize that was snarky, but my nerves are frayed.  Snarky is what I have left in the tank these days.  Posting these doom and gloom vast conspiracy plots online they seek to control the fear they feel by shoving it into a familiar compartment.  Just like the white lighters they are not committed to dealing with what is in front of them.

So that leaves us the deniers.  These folks always downplay things.  The climate is not changing, and even if it is we're not to blame.  Even if we are to blame, we can't do anything about it.  If we could do something about it then the economy would be ruined.  Oddly enough these old arguments have just been substituted for the virus.  It's not that serious.  Well it's not serious except for old people or sick people.  It's just like the flu.  It's better that some people die rather than ruining the economy.  I don't know how to explain to people that they should care that their actions can inadvertently kill someone.  Maybe not someone they know, but someone who matters to somebody.  Maybe it comes from having a culture of disposability.  We throw so much out right after we're done with it. I think that we've  over the years started to see people the same way.  When they serve no more use for us, we just dispose of them.

Why am I telling you this?  Well I find that expressing myself seems to be my way of dealing with the fear that the current crisis evokes.  I also want to impress upon you how much your actions in this time matter. The failings of our society are being exposed in high contrast.  We will have a narrow window to act to change things for the better, but that change is not guaranteed without our continued efforts.  It is easy to be sucked into the black holes of denial, fantasized spiritual optimism, or the web of conspiracies.  It is much more difficult to stand centered in who we are, and choose who we want to be in this pivotal moment.  Make no mistake this is a fulcrum of history, but even if we do change for the better it will still be a tragedy.  It will be a tragedy because we could have decided to do better without having so many people die.  We could have averted much of the coming suffering if we realized earlier that our own well being is intrinsically linked to everyone's well being.

How about you?  Are you balancing between trying to maintain hope amidst crisis while acknowledging the fear and grief?  Are you giving your power to false idols with pie in the sky philosophies?  Are you sure that you and you alone know the true movers and players in this world wide game of Risk?  Well slow down there slick, maybe you just need to sit with your feelings and have a good cry in the shower.  When you're done call one of your friends and check up on them, because right now the one thing we can do (and absolutely should do) is be kind.  If nothing else let us learn that our actions towards others have consequences, and that we should weigh those carefully.   Welcome to the new world, please treat it and each other well.

Peace and Blessings,
Thomas Mooneagle