Connections...

Did you look out for signs over the Twelve Days?  Those inbetween, interstitial, liminal days?  Did you snatch a glimpse of the year ahead by paying attention to the oracles all around you?  I did.  Well, of course I did.  What did I see?  Let’s not go there.  Let’s just say it’s going to be an interesting year. 

One word kept coming up again and again. Connection.  And one symbol kept coming up over and over.  A web.  It culminated in the beautiful image Caitlin Matthews posted on Facebook of not one, but several webs, webs within webs.  The Web of Wyrd.  That links everything, everyone.  Touch the edge of a web and the reverberations are felt throughout the entire structure.  For yes, we are all connected.  Each and every one of us.

I watch the interwebs (there we go again) and I see people who are scared; who are worried about the world. They are scared about what we’re doing to the environment; to the economy; to one another. And they have good reason to be concerned.  We are doing terrible things to our beautiful world.  We do terrible things to one another. We do terrible things to ourselves.

Several months back I remember saying to Marek, ‘How can we save the world?’ and he replied. ‘We can’t. We can only save ourselves.’  And I thought about it and I figured he was absolutely right.  For, truly, you can’t ever change other people. You can only change yourself.  I'm not talking about being selfish; about ignoring what is going on in the world - far from it.  It's simply that you cannot force people to change; you cannot make them see the world your way. No matter how much you would love them to do so. 
In Symphonic Bridges, Marek puts it like this...
"I wish my parents would choose to join me in my spiritual exploration. I wish they would decide to take up the rejuvenation and longevity. The latter  doesn’t make sense without the former, of(f) course. I wish my mother would learn to swim and ride a bike finally. Even at the age of eighty or something. I wish I didn’t think that I should have rather used Simple Past tense after all the above ‘I wish’s’. Wishful thinking… 

Wishing is all I can do really. I can’t even persuade my sons that eating meat is bad for them. Will they blame me in the future for my not being strict enough with them about it now. If they ever go on vegetarian diet. Maybe I should just make them give up this barbarian habit. But wouldn’t it be a violation of their freedom of choice? We all have free will. Though freedom ends where our decision would lead to hurting other people.

Therefore, I choose to avoid enforcement of any ‘spiritual imperatives’. Instead of telling my wife, children, parents and other people what they have to do to live a better life, I just keep setting a good example. That’s what I believe it is anyway."

And that's just talking about simple things like diet.  We're contrary creatures - the moment someone says we 'should' do something, we tend to want to do the polar opposite.  Look at the storm in a teacup today over the government telling us how much alcohol we should be drinking - or rather not drinking.  Look how defensive the US becomes over genetically engineered food or carbon emissions.  We don't like being told off.  
But if we all changed…?  If we all became alchemists…?  If we all saw beyond the greed and the need and the fear and the defensiveness?  Oh then, then…who knows what would happen?  Remember the tale of the hundredth monkey?  

And at Zumba the other night, Debbie played this as our cool-down track…

And this morning, on Twitter, lovely Melpomene played a Cat Stevens track which made me think of this…

And this…

Yeah, it always adds up to one thing…  Love.  Just Love.