This morning, at 6:24 EDT, about three minutes after I rehung the oversized, old-fashioned, analog, living room clock back onto its hook over the red bookcase my father made me when I was a child, it slipped off its nail, crashed to the floor, cracked its frame, and the glass covering its face shattered into shards. I am quite sad about this, and it also left me feeling a bit uneasy. I am not a superstitious person, I know I did not hang it securely, and yet … these are uneasy and unhinged times. I don’t believe in “bad luck,” but I do look for meaning in most everything. Almost certainly, the meaning here is “be more careful and deliberate with your actions,” though I think I could have taken that meaning without the smashing of a good clock. Sigh.
We humans do this all the time, don’t we? We walk through the world and our lives distracted, angry, frightened, rushed, grieving, and full of grievance; we are not present to ourselves, our families, nature, or the shenanigans of those who desire power for their own sakes, and in our absent-mindedness we wreak havoc upon all our relationships (to one another, to the planet and her systems, and in our human politics.)
We have not been filled with caring; we have been filled with other things, things that are not of The Good, and it is showing very, very, plainly now. Just look at the headlines. Look at them, but do not believe for a second that the stories they tell are necessary or fated in any way. They are not.
We do not need to behave this way. We do not need to be afraid. We do not need to hand our power and agency over to evil. We are not fated to bomb one another into oblivion, see our brothers and sisters murdered in the streets of our cities and towns, or sacrifice our children to those who would abuse them; we are not fated to let our neighbors go hungry, unhoused, uneducated, or uncared for. We are not.
It is time to reset our lives, my dears. We must re-turn to our humanity; to our capacity for love and kindness; to a focus on the essential and the essentials once again. The old clocks are breaking, times are changing, humanity is awakening. You may not know it from the headlines, but you can feel it in your own consciousness that something is terribly wrong. Change in the human world; renaissance, if you will, happens first within us, and then spreads outward.
We are coming to the end of the age of patriarchy, the end of empire, the end of violence as a solution to anything. Be ready, these things will not end quietly, their perpetrators and adherents will lash out, hurt many, harm much, and destroy whatever they can. Be ready. Do not fear. Do not obey the unjust or their proclamations. Stand in grace. Support and participate in the good. Boycott the malign. Speak truth lovingly and unflinchingly. Let the renaissance begin within you.
Courage my dears. Love one another.
