Balance and Hope: The Spring Equinox

My grandfather was what they used to call a Half-breed. That meant that he was half white and half Indian. I use the word Indian because that was how he thought of himself. The politically correct term “Native American” didn’t exist in his time.

He hid this fact from all of us. We never knew until we gathered at his funeral in Seattle. Some of his family came to pay respects, all the way from Kansas. Today it’s a pretty short trip. In my grandfather’s time it was a trek, a long and arduous one. After the funeral we came back to my grandmother’s small home and gathered in her tiny living room. We shared stories with our distant relatives and this is when it came out that my grandfather’s mother was an Indian.

My grandmother, who had taken to her bed earlier, shrieked from her back bedroom and staggered out in traumatized dismay. There was a hub-bub as everyone shared their reactions. I sat on the couch in silence and felt my heart open. It was as if a light had turned on inside me. I was thrilled to learn that I came from a line of true Native Americans.

So many things fell into place for me that day. First was the insight that I belonged here. I was part of this land. My ancestors had lived here in peace and harmony and reverence for centuries. I felt my connection to this soil and a sense of the sacred. I flashed back to being a teenager at summer camp, watching the sun sink behind the Tetons, hearing the Gros Ventre River whisper through the distant reeds, as we campers performed our nightly ritual, facing the mountains and singing “Peace I Ask of Thee O’ River.” We honored the day and marked the night with prayer.

I felt true peace in those closing moments of my summer days and while those moments faded in memory, they took deep root in my core. So it was a joyous moment for me to read this morning, a day of both the Spring Equinox and the Full Moon, that the Supreme Court awarded a decision to the Yakama Tribe, honoring a treaty signed in 1855. Today, America did the right thing. What an auspicious sign for our future! How lovely that it occurred on the Spring Equinox which is all about balance, rebirth and relationship.

Our ancestors celebrated this day, performing rituals to welcome back light, life and hope. I wonder how many of us today even realize it’s the equinox? We have lost touch with Earth’s natural cycles. Yes, we notice that it’s too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer, but in general we don’t pay attention to the shifting background of stars, or the relationship between the Earth, the Moon and the Sun, let alone all the planets, seen and unseen, that inform our reality and our individual psyches.

There is magic and power all around us just awaiting our attention. Caroline Casey, renowned astrologer and story-teller, says that help is there for the asking, but the “gods,” by which she means the planets and the archetypal energies they represent, don’t speak English. They only understand intent which is demonstrated by ritual. Our contemporary rituals these days involve food, commerce and entertainment which we perform with little, if any, reverence. They have become unconscious routines and therefore powerless. One way to recapture some personal power is to align with nature’s cycles and honor them with conscious ritual.

One of my rituals is to seek good news, or at least encouraging information, every morning. I have performed this ritual for so many years that the universe responds immediately now. My smart phone volunteered to be Hermes, or Mercury, delivering messages from the Good News Gods first thing in the morning. And I plan to share it with you.

I think we can agree that our world is out of balance now.

It seems a dark and frightening place. The unknown looms and many of us fear it. Dark forces arise. The spectres of death, famine, genocide, plague and war are waiting in the wings. Problems are multiplying exponentially and we don’t seem to have the will nor the wisdom to solve them. But fear not. They are only spectres, projections from our collective consciousness. We can rob them of their power. We can change our consciousness and thereby change the world.

We are in the midst of transformation.. We are evolving! This miracle is happening right now on a Meta-level. Human consciousness is evolving to a higher state! It’s the most amazing thing happening on the planet even though we never hear about it. No “Breaking News” banners for this event.

We all came here, at this tipping point in time, to participate in a transformation of our collective consciousness. And when this transformation is complete, we will not only know our Oneness, we will know and embrace our collective creative power. We will see a much bigger picture. We will know with a deep certainty that we share one consciousness, and that this consciousness is all there is. We will know that we can direct this consciousness and transform our world into whatever glorious reality we want.

That’s what this blog is all about. I’m on the cheerleading squad at Evolution U. I want to bring you encouraging news – news of our fellow humans, with sacred values, doing amazing things to evolve our reality in a positive direction; news of discoveries that explode our paradigm and show us a new way to look at things; symbolic language that can lure you into the realm of the Metaphoric Mind; stories that haunt your unconscious and bring forth your own mythic journey.

We are facing some challenging times and we can either fall victim to someone else’s vision, or we can step into our power and change the flow. It is our choice! We can create the future we want. The time is now. The energies are aligned. The Cosmos is supporting us in this Great Venture and I would love to share this adventure with you.

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