I’ve stood in the front lawn gazing eye-to-eye with a fox not twenty feet away on several lovely occasions over the years. There’s no feeling of superiority on either side, rather, one of mutual respect and interest. I’ve heard the ravens chanting their variegated language from atop the high Ponderosas around our property, or chatting casually with one-another while soaring over-head, and they project their own enthusiasm at life and their own unique intelligence. Once or twice a Hawk has swooped down low under the trees and turned his head to look at me while sailing past. I could hear, and almost feel, the wind whistling through his feathers. I’ve heard mice cry in the night when caught by a cat. Lizards and Praying Mantes tilt their heads and orbit their eyes to gaze at me when I bend over them. Dragonflies do the same as they rest in perfect posture and poise upon a rose petal or the tip of the Red-Hot Pokers.
In this world on which we place our feet daily, there are certain realities roving abroad like ghouls, utterly hostile to the simple humility which nature exhibits. We have a society founded upon a high ideal, that of the Constitution of the united States, which has become the impotent wish of the unprivileged and the whipping post of the wealthy and powerful in their efforts endlessly to expand their own appetites. The pendulum appears to be swinging now centuries back into the past, back towards the feudal times. Having lived as well-fed and largely autonomous serfs in a country never truly achieving its ideal, unprivileged citizens now must surrender even that status and are confronted with the prospect of an imposed servitude and poverty previously afforded only to slaves in other centuries, or to cattle in this. It’s a very difficult and bitter truth, but it is what we must confront.
Standing apparently powerless at the porch before these looming possibilities, in the initial chill of their unfolding shadows as they seem to relentlessly insinuate themselves, can be a painful, even horrendous, ordeal; but as with any ordeal, it also contains a core of unique opportunity. The times require each of us to grow more than we might ever have believed possible before, in ways of authority and personal power that have largely been hidden away by a bankrupt educational system and an abused public commons.
In the past, civilized societies offered their youth or their aspiring seers a “rite of passage,” an initiation, or a vision quest, in order that they might transition from the burden of old half-baked perceptions from childhood and ignorance and perforce bring forth wisdom from a deep, mystical inner well of insight and revelation, their individual lives transformed by it and thus their renewed presence become a transformitive force for the society around them. Such, truly, is the opportunity presented now in this “trial by fire” through which we’re now traveling. Indeed, to varying degrees over the eons, it is the continual nature of life in the world to challenge and purify as in a crucible, the spirit of every individual. Now seems more intense in many ways, and it is also made more intense by the simple fact that it is not something about which to read in history books or the news of other nations, it’s something that confronts us every day in the present. Accepting it and rising above it is the opportunity for the individual, and by extension, it becomes an opportunity for society to improve. Yet, first and foremost, evolution starts in one’s self, not in someone else.
In honesty one must admit that our culture of consumerism and self-indulgence has produced an aversion to virtue and humility and an attraction to greed and other negative passions, in some ways overt and in others beguilingly subtle. It’s simply the nature of the mind and emotions to seek the path of greatest immediate pleasure, no matter the long term costs. Whatever one must feel about the current direction of society under the brutish tyranny of ignorance compounded with the greed of oligarchs and political pawns, one must also recognize there is in this a blessing for it drives the individual back to reassess one’s values, to know what is most important in one’s life and to begin to turn away from counter-productive pursuits. Painful though it is, it is much like the “rites of passage” of the past and affords a profound opportunity, in fact, for personal spiritual evolution.
When the ravens pass overhead, talking about their various daily matters, they know, it is visible in their dark shadow, that death and pain are part of life. They have embraced their shadows. They’ve seen death on the roads of men, eaten the very carcasus of slaughtered rabits and foxes; they’ve seen death in the silent pine needles of nature’s hidden forest passages. One can see much formerly hidden within one’s self by gazing boldly through the dark portal of the Raven’s shadow. The ravens’ sense of humor is infectious, their wit and intelligence evident, simply because they do not deny their own shadow. By embracing it, they have transformed it into a source of light. Such is also the case with the simple calendula flower which opens its radiance like the rising sun above the decaying spoilage of the ever churning soil, drawing its very life from, and from beyond, the cast-off remains of previous years.
