I am anticipating the Taurus new moon April 21 with peace already suffusing my happy heart. The meeting of Jupiter and Venus in March was the highlight of a hope filled year for workers, even with all the violence of tiny people shaking their fists at death dealing weapons of the rich and powerful.
Every day the atrocities are in the news. The violence is just impossible to ignore. And yet people still cry out for more, still refuse to return quietly to their humble homes in the shadows of well groomed palaces and lush gardens walked in peaceful meditation by the urbane shapers of their limited destiny.
Who is misbehaving? Who is in need of a civilizing influence? Are these people, who are splashing paint all over the walls in the street, thugs on drugs? Do they require the iron hand of tanks and machine guns to make them respect the rights of others? Where is this sense of entitlement coming from, that people are willing to kill and be killed in order to get their message heard?
I wrestle every day with the knowledge that this wave of destruction and chaos could reach my peaceful little world and suck me into despair. What will I do when put on the spot? I too am a no body, subject to the fickle winds of history; what will I do if forced to publicly declare what matters most to me? Will I stand in front of an immigrant friend and say you take them away over my dead body? Or will I crumble in cowered silence as they are taken off to work in a factory south of the border where heads get lopped off and rolled in the streets?
I share responsibility for the suffering of others, but I live in peace. I enjoy too many comforts to count, yet I live in fear that they could be snatched from me any day. How?
The exercise of looking at crude maps of the solar system and seeing how its configuration changes from day to day helps me live with this real sense of foreboding. I imagine my body rotting or going up in smoke when I die, all the mass of water, carbon and minerals just dissipating into the vast sky, evaporating peacefully from the ground, or violently in a stoked furnace, to my former home before individual existence. I have a good idea of where I will go when this trip on earth is finished.
With this awareness I can turn my attention to the niggling task of how best to love and accept love from the people around me, feeling like a somewhat educated flea, determined to enjoy the ride on my host and get the most out of it.
