I haven’t been writing since last year. Mostly because I’ve been overwhelmed by all the craziness that’s been going on in the world.

Is Syria’s evil dictator insane? He certainly is suicidal. Even if he kills off all the protesters, he’s still going down. He’s an incredibly hateful person who has attracted an incredible amount of hatred to himself, more than enough to bring him down. And what about his country, what about Syria? Does he care that he’s ruining it? Is he too nuts to see this?

What about Israel and Iran? Why is it okay for Israel to have atomic weapons but not Iran? Are Jews better than Muslims? Not. They are all equally insane – and suicidal too.

And back here at home. Are the candidates for the Republican Party’s presidential candidacy insane too? They sure sound that way, especially Santorum. They are certainly suicidal, letting the rest of us know just how ignorant and bigoted they really are.

In fact, it seems to me that much of humankind is insane and suicidal, or stupid and ignorant, or all of the above. Here in the US, many stupid people, mostly southern Republicans, still think Obama is a Muslim. And many of the ignorant and stupid religious right folks still think that the Sun goes around the Earth. They put down all of science, not just astronomy, not even being open to seeing the obvious effects of global warming. They’re dangerous in their bigoted ignorance.

More and more folks are going over to the Dark Side, embracing their righteous negativity. Especially members of the big three evil religions, the Jewish, the Christian and the Muslim ones. Their petty squabbles are bringing the rest of us down, Good God! Who do they think they are? They are even willing to destroy our world just to prove themselves right, whatever that means.

Every day, I move through disbelief, fear and anger, seldom hope, over and over again. I can’t believe that so many folks in the world can be so stupid and spiteful. I can’t understand why they continue trying to push the rest of us over the edge and into the abyss.

I can relate to the Lakota and their Ghost Dance. Like them, I sometimes I wish those of us who are into love and positive energy could move on to another world, leaving behind those caught up in power and hate. Actually, I’d rather that those hateful religious bigots would rapture themselves out of here, leaving this wonderful world for us.

What sort of world do we want to live in? Certainly not one like the one we’re living in now. Where should we take this current revolution, this chance for a new and brighter future? If we don’t know where we want to go, how will we ever get there?
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I envision a world where there is complete acceptance of all human beings by all human beings, regardless of gender, race, nationality, religion, or sexual preference, a world where there are no outsiders, no untouchables, not in any sense of that old and ugly word.

I envision a world where there is equality, on all levels for all folks, a world where there are no leaders or followers, no hierarchies at all. Where there are no privileged folks, not in any way.

I envision a world where there are no bosses, no one telling anyone what to do. This is a Rainbow Family concept. At the gatherings, everything is always decided by consensus. The entire idea of leaders and followers puts most of us down. Also, it should be obvious by now that all the leaders, throughout history to these present days, are always stupid, greedy, power seeking assholes.

I envision a world where there is no money, where everything is free. This is another Rainbow Family idea. Earlier though, back in the early 60’s, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters took it one step further, putting all their possessions in one room. When one of them needed something, he or she would get it out of the room, use it, and then return it to the pile.

James Redfield had a similar idea in his book, The Celestine Prophecy. He sees a future in which “Our needs for survival – foodstuffs and clothing and transportation – will be totally automated and at everyone’s disposal. Out needs will be completely met without the exchange of any currency.”
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How will we ever get from where we are now, mired in prejudice, inequality, greed, and evil bosses with their stupid power games? It will never happen with protests or revolutions. Anger and righteousness will kill any change for a higher future.

It will never happen unless we change our consciousness, and I definitely do not mean just our thoughts. I don’t even mean the consciousness that seems to live in our heads, the consciousness that we think comes from our brains Actually, each chakra has it’s own consciousness, and, if we let it, it will contribute to the whole.

We will need to change our consciousness from our present day and very limited left-brain ego consciousness – that very small bit of consciousness that we are able to accept today with our closed minds – to one more whole, one without fear, one more open to both masculine and feminine consciousness, and especially one that is more connected to Spirit.

I liked what Grof said about the results of his LSD Psychotherapy. I like that he showed us that we can all be fully conscious, as he describes it. This is certainly a goal worth achieving. If we can do this, we will have a future, otherwise, probably not.

I don’t care how we get there, to this new and higher consciousness. If we can get there without acid, fine. But if we can’t find our way to this higher consciousness otherwise, please remember that acid as therapy can take us there. We could just make acid legal for psychotherapy, as it once was. It would sure help. I think that’s why it’s here, to take us into our future.

According to Grof, with the guided use of LSD, we can overcome our fear of death, the source of most of our fears. We can give up our head trips and learn to appreciate the simpler aspects of existence. We can give up being selfish and competitive. And, of course, we can realize how exciting the exploration of consciousness can be. As Grof says, “The universe ceases to be a gigantic assembly of material objects; it becomes an infinite system of adventures in consciousness.”
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I envision a future that would satisfy all of us. This is so because no one would be prejudiced against another person, not after becoming conscious of that side of him or herself that is like that other person. I envision a future where we are all equal, where we know that no one is better or worse than we are. This is so because we have seen who we really are. I envision a future where there are no bosses, no leaders and followers. How could a fully conscious being think that they knew another’s path through life? I also see a future where everything is free, where we finally realize that we are all family.

The 60’s revolution failed. We all know this. The bad guys kept their power and undid almost all of the positive changes we had worked so hard for – all of them that they could undo, that is. However, some of the things we worked so hard to actualize back then did survive. In fact, many of the positive social changes from the 60’s revolution are still with us today.
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We have become much more aware of our Mother Earth, this awesome Spaceship Earth that we all live upon, cruising through the endless space-time continuum. We have learned that she is more fragile than we thought. We have learned that she loves us all dearly – after all, she is our mother. We have also begun to realize that we can help her too.

We have become more aware of the various kinds of pollution that are slowly killing all life on Mother Earth, whether it be in our waters, in our air, or even in our earth itself. We have seen the enemy, and he is not us. He is of the 1 percent that try to lord over the rest of us. If they would just get out of our way, we could still save ourselves and Mother Earth.

We have become more aware of overpopulation, although we haven’t done anything about it yet. In fact, there is a powerful faction here in the United States that is against limiting the population. But Mother Earth can only keep so many of us folks alive and well. Too many folks are already dying of hunger, bad water, and disease. I keep hearing folks saying, “Maybe we should all have to have a license to be a parent.” Good idea, but try telling that to most of the folks on this planet.

We have become more aware of the effects of global warming. This was something we were already very concerned about in the 60’s. It seemed obvious to us then. Now it is obvious to almost everybody, although the many brain-dead folks aligned with the immoral world of greed are still in convenient denial.

It is obvious now though. Temperatures are rising. Animals and even plants are slowly migrating north in the Northern Hemisphere. Most of the world’s glaciers are going or already gone. When we hike in the high country around here, we see that the glaciers we used to play on are already gone.
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Since the 60’s, we have become more aware of our bodies too. Physical health and fitness have become more important. More and more folks are walking, running, bicycling, skating, swimming, working out with weights, playing sports, skiing, climbing rocks, hiking, backpacking, doing yoga, making love, and all the other adventures that we give to ourselves these days. More and more of us folks are not going blindly into couch potato old age.

More folks are now exploring and enjoying Mother Nature in her wilder aspects. We are rediscovering Her as she truly is, as a place of high adventure as well as a place of spiritual renewal. Many of us use Her wild mountains and deserts as spiritual retreats, as places away from the chaotic group consciousness of the city and this sick society that we all live in, a place where we can slow down and listen to Spirit.
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In the early 60’s, it was difficult if not impossible to find organic food in most towns and cities across the country. Most of what we did find was in funky co-ops or vitamin shops that carried only a few organic items. Organic food sure caught on fast though. Look around now. There are at least ten natural food stores here in Boulder, and many more in the nearby, surrounding communities. And most of the big chains, Safeway and King Supers, are carrying more and more organic foods.

Along with this, in the 60’s, came an upsurge in organic gardening. For many of us, gardening has become a new but meaningful endeavor. Today, it is becoming a necessity.

People are raising chickens nowadays too, for the eggs mostly. But some folks are killing the males when they are old enough to be called fryers. At least three of our neighbors here in the city are raising them. No roosters though. Too noisy, too early in the morning.
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The 60’s really changed the status of women. We have finally begun to realize the importance of women and the feminine. We are finally accepting that women are different from men and at least equal to them. They certainly can mellow out the men’s warlike, testosterone induced energy. Without their balancing energy, men would probably have already destroyed this world of ours. Women can create life, whereas men can only destroy it.

Motherhood has become more important and more respected too. Women can now nurse in public. Many women can take maternity leave from their jobs and can even nurse at work now. Since the 60’s, women have gained much in the way of freedom, in so many areas of life.

Blacks are accorded much greater respect than they were before the 60’s. When I was young, we never saw a black person on TV or in movies, not unless it was Jack Benny’s Rochester. The same is true for the other minorities, especially for the Asians and the Latinos. Even the Indians are getting a better press these days.

Gay men and women have become much more accepted in our culture too, even in the military. Now they can honor their love for one another in a sacred marriage, just as those of us who are not gay have always been able to do.

Perhaps we are slowly becoming a more accepting culture. We definitely need to keep moving in this direction. It is in the Tao.
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Most of us are back living in our single-family dwellings, inside our single-family minds. Most of us have given up on community, although we do keep saying that it takes a village to raise a child, almost as if we’re trying to remind ourselves of something.

Lately, however, I have been hearing folks wishing that they could share the childcare, preferably without everyone having to live together in one house or on one farm. These folks are just beginning to wake up. At this time in history, we all need to remember (with a slight change) that old 60’s saying, “People (originally ‘dope’) will get you through times of no money better than money will get you times of no people.“

Dope helps too, helps community. Remember the circles and folks saying, “What goes around, comes around.”
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I wonder where we will take the world with this revolution? All these gains from the 60’s were just baby steps, mere beginnings on our way to a higher future. Wherever we do take it, it will help us if we remember that we are all here together on Spaceship Earth and that to keep it livable, we all have to work together.

In my next note, I will begin to share my vision for our collective future.

During the 60’s, those of us who wanted to create a more spiritual reality used various paths to become more conscious, loving, and kind.

We used various forms of dream work. This included analyzing our dreams and/or using active imagination, or visualization, to understand their messages. We learned from Jung and Perls and others what dreams are and how we could use them to become more whole beings. We learned that dreams speak in ‘God’s forgotten language.’

We discovered the I Ching, the ancient Chinese holy book, an extremely high spiritual book. We saw that the book was also an oracle that responded to whatever question we might ask by describing the situation that we found ourselves in at the time we asked the question.

Many of us began meditating in the 60’s, influenced perhaps by the influx of the many Buddhists who saw a golden opportunity and came to America to gather disciples. Many of us still meditate, just doing our own forms.

Many of us favored LSD in the 60’s. We weren’t afraid of it then as many folks are nowadays. We liked how it made us more clear and compassionate. We found that we could be completely open and honest with one another when we tripped together. We found that we couldn’t bullshit when we were tripping, not to ourselves or to each other. We called it acid honesty.
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Although I don’t think Stan Grof’s way, his LSD Psychotherapy way, is necessary – many of us have done it on our own, in our own ways – but it does work. The result of his LSD therapy, the sort of person one can become, is described in the following quotes from his bookLSD Psychotherapy (see pages 227 and following if your curious.)

“It (LSD) has mediated a profound spiritual opening in atheists, skeptics, and materialistically oriented scientist, facilitated far reaching emotional liberation, and caused radical changes in value systems and the basic life style.”

“Subjects free themselves from certain idiosyncratic perceptions, inappropriate emotional responses, rigid value systems, irrational attitudes, and maladjustive behavior patterns that are products of their early programming.”

“They suddenly see that their entire concept of existence and approach to it had been contaminated by a deep, unconscious fear of death.”

“The emphasis shifts from pursuit of complicated external schemes to appreciation of simple aspects of existence.”

“A selfish and competitive approach to existences is seen as ignorant, inferior, and ultimately self-destructive.”

“The western life philosophy, which confuses conspicuous consumption with richness of life is replaced by a new emphasis on “voluntary simplicity.”

“Another striking aspect of the psychedelic transformation is the development of intense interest in consciousness, self-exploration, and the spiritual quest.”

“The universe ceases to be a gigantic assembly of material objects: it becomes an infinite system of adventures in consciousness.”

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Those folks ‘in power’ today, those who are still trying to bullshit us so that they can ‘control’ us and the world, all those politicians and other leaders, were so afraid of LSD in the 60’s, afraid of how it was waking folks up, that they made it illegal and those of us who disagreed, outlaws.

Those bad guys are still out there. If we wish to overcome them, we have to be more conscious, more loving, and more kind. We can’t win by fighting them. We have to walk those peaceful spiritual paths again.

In my next note, I’ll share some of the positive results of our efforts in the 60’s, results such as environmental awareness, the growing equality of women and the feminine, the equality of gay men and women in our culture, the health and fitness movements that have led to organic foods and gardening, and the notion that it takes a village. I’ll look ahead too, wondering where we can take the current spiritual revolution.

We don’t need to wait until the current revolution is over before we begin creating our new world. We didn’t wait the last time a revolution was attempted, back in the 60’s. And we don’t need to wait until this one is over either. We can start now.
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In the sixties and early seventies, the counter-culture split into two main factions. Many of us stayed with our anger and fought against the establishment – in the anti-war, anti-nuke, and other anti- movements.

Some of us, however, worked to create a new world – a new way of being, a new way of relating to each other, a new way of living with one another. We became quite creative.

We created communities. We created the Rainbow Gathering, a spiritual gathering that brought thousands of folks together every year. We created the notion of non-hierarchal councils in which everyone had a voice and was listened to. We created men and women’s groups.

Instead of focusing on our anger, we focused on the spiritual. Most importantly, we created a new consciousness, using dreams, meditation, the I Ching, bodywork, and various psychedelics, all for personal and spiritual growth.

In spite of all the love and energy that we put into it, the 60’s revolution failed. The Rainbow Gathering eventually turned itself into a party, most of the communes failed, and folks stopped trying to be more conscious. Instead they began to focus on making more and more money. Most tellingly, over time we all stopped saying “have a good day” and began saying “take care.” Will “take cover” be next?

If the current revolution succeeds, and we wish to move on to new ways of being human, we need to create and share new visions for our collective future, visions that we can begin to actualize now. It’s so much easier to focus our spiritual energy if we know where we want to go with it.

In my next note, I’ll share some of the spiritual paths we took in the 60’s, as well as where they took us.

This is the first in a series of essays that ask and attempt to answer the question “What will we do after the revolution? What sort of world will we wish to live in then?”

The Arab Spring and now the Occupy Wall Street movements have begun to wake up more and more of us folks. We are finally beginning to be aware of what has been going on in the world – what with the rich and powerful few running things and using the rest of us as wage slaves or cannon fodder for their many unnecessary and immoral wars.

As we have become more and more aware, we have become more and more angry. Right now, we are using our anger to take their immoral power away from them, the power that they have used to sit on the rest of us. But anger is useful only at the beginning of a revolution. It is needed perhaps to get it going, but it is not the way to the future.

So, what do we do after we have taken down those very few powerful and immoral folks who have trashed the 99% of us and our world? What will we do after the revolution? We certainly don’t want to let our anger take us over and turn us into mere copies of those we have supplanted. So again, what sort of world do we envision for after the revolution?

Lets look ahead. Lets imagine a future that will fulfill each and every one of us. What sort of world do we want? Certainly not one designed for inequality and injustice. Certainly not one designed to create poverty and hatred. Certainly not one that will just repeat the mistakes of the past that we are dealing with today

How about a world where everyone shares and works to further one another, a world in which love has supplanted fear and anger. Seems radical, perhaps impossible, doesn’t it? How can we ever hope to do this?

Certainly not by any changes in the political or economic or social structures. They are the problem. They have led us straight to the inequalities and injustices of today. What we need instead is a change in consciousness, a change in the way we look at ourselves and each other. Once we understand this, we will realize that the only way to heal the world is to first heal ourselves.

We can heal ourselves by opening up to ourselves and exploring our heads and our hearts, diving deeply into ours psyches and rooting out all those old fears and hurts and angers that we have never dealt with, all that shit we have hidden from ourselves in the dark closets of our minds.

When we have done this, we will have peace in our hearts, and it will spread out into the world.

Still thinking about children and personhood, I remembered how Henry Miller, in his book Tropic of Capricorn, talked about the difference between children and adults. In Miller’s opinion, once one becomes an adult, one loses one’s personhood and instead becomes a frightened and calculating being. In his life, Miller says he watched sadly as his friends grew up and stopped being real, stopped being persons.

In Miller’s book, he says: “At seven years, we knew with dead certainty, for example, that such a fellow would end up in prison, that another would be a drudge, and another a good for nothing, and so on. We were absolutely correct in our diagnoses, much more correct, for example, than our parents, or our teachers, more correct, indeed, than the so-called psychologists … The learning we received only tended to obscure our vision, From the day we went to school, we learning nothing; on the contrary, we were made obtuse, we were wrapped in a fog of words and abstractions.”

He goes on to say, “What I am thinking of, with a certain amount of regret and longing, is that this thoroughly restricted life of early boyhood seems like a limitless universe, and the life that followed upon it, the life of an adult, a constantly diminishing realm. From the moment when one is put in school one is lost, one has a feeling of having a halter put around his neck. The taste goes out of the bread as it goes out of life. Getting the bread becomes more important than the eating of it. Everything is calculated, and everything has a price on it.”
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Still thinking about the difference between children and adults, I also remembered what Tim Leary once said, lecturing to a crowd of us at the University of Oregon in Eugene. He told us that we should never become grownups, never become adults. He said that we should just keep on growing and reminded us that the word adult is the past participle of the Latin verb adulescere, meaning to grow up.
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In my life, I have continued to live as I lived as a boy. I am the same person I have always been. I have not left behind the honesty and awareness of my childhood. I have not finished growing. and I have not and never will become one of those uptight and frightened adults.

In my life, I don’t see myself as old. I’m still me, still the same person I’ve always been, just older than I was before And I must say, I’m proud of the seventy-eight trips around the sun that I’ve made so far. It’s been quite a ride, and I’m not done yet.

I just read Orson Scott Card’s introduction to his book Ender’s Game, one of my most favorite stories. Now I’m reading the story itself once again. At first, I though that Jake might want to read it to himself. But he and I have decided that it’s a bit over his head for now. So I’m reading it aloud to the entire family every night.

I have read Card’s wonderful story many times, but this was the first time I have read his introduction. It was beautiful, moving. Orson Scott Card is a beautiful person. In his introduction, in response to critics who said that children don’t talk and think like they do in Ender’s Game, Card wrote:–

“Yet I knew – I knew – that this was one of the truest things about Ender’s Game. In fact, I realized in retrospect that this may indeed be part of the reason why it was so important to me … to write a story in which gifted children are trained to fight in adult wars. Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along – the same person that I am today. I never felt that I spoke childishly. I never felt that my emotions and desires were somehow less real than adult emotions and desires. And in writing Ender’s Game, I forced the audience to experience the lives of these children from that perspective – the perspective in which their feeling and decisions are just as real and important as any adult’s.”
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I have always known that children are persons. Like Card, I was a person myself as a boy. So were all my friends. However, since I have grown up, I have been criticized by many adults who say that I shouldn’t talk to children as I do – as I did with the other children when I was still a child myself. They say I shouldn’t talk to them as if they were persons. They argue that children are not yet really persons. They are wrong.

Certainly, none of my children have ever criticized me for treating them as persons, for being real with them. They appreciate my respect and my honesty. I think it helps them to be more respectful and honest themselves.
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The public school system certainly does not treat children as persons. They definitely don’t want to see who my boys really are. And, because of that, they don’t encourage them to be real persons.

We have sent our son Callahan to a middle school noted for its artistic focus. But Callahan still has to take all the typical academic courses, none of which really interest him, except perhaps for science. He has to take these academic courses just because they insist he does so. And they have offered him only one course, a course in beginning art, that speaks to who he is as a creative person.

I watch the school system fill my boys with collective bullshit – as if they were empty and needed filling – trying to make them fit into the system’s way of thinking about the world. I watch them judge my boys negatively if they don’t conform to the system’s collective way. It’s obvious that they don’t want to know anything about, let alone further, the person who already exists in each one of them.

I wanted to write something today but couldn’t think of anything to write about. So I asked the I Ching, asked what I should write. I received the Hexagram Modesty and that changed to the Hexagram Gathering Together. I understood then what I was to write about. And I also understood why I was to write about it at this time.

First, here’s what the I Ching says:

In Modesty: “It is the law of heaven to make fullness empty and to make full what is modest.”

“This heavenly law works itself out in the fates of men also. It is the law of earth to alter the full and to contribute to the modest. High mountains are worn down by the waters, and the valleys are filled up. It it the law of fate to undermine what is full and to prosper the modest. And men also hate fullness and love the modest.”

When “the superior man establishes order in the world, he equalizes the extremes that are the source of social discontent and thereby creates just and equable conditions,”

In Gathering Together; “When men are to be gathered together, religious forces are needed.”

“Only collective moral force can unite the world. Such great times of unification will leave great achievements behind them. This is the significance of the great offerings that are made. In the secular sphere likewise there is need of great deeds in the time of Gathering Together.”

And in its fourth line of Gathering Together, the I Ching says: “This describes a man who gathers people around him in the name of his ruler. Since he is not striving for any special advantages for himself but is working unselfishly to bring about general unity, his work is crowned with success, and everything becomes as it should be.”
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And here’s what I say: This man described in that fourth line of Gathering Together is of course each and every one of us who are working to establish peace and harmony in the world. We’re not working to further ourselves, but rather to heal our world. Knowing full well that it is “the law of heaven to make fullness empty and to make full what is modest.” Knowing that God is on our side, knowing that God is helping us now.

The laws of the universe are on our side. Those overly full, and certainly overly rich, folks are definitely heading for a fall. It is inevitable. It is made of their one-sided and insatiable greed, a natural but destructive consequence of their constant, yet always unsuccessful attempts to fill their empty lives.

And we do not have to do anything to make it happen. They will fall. We can just stay modest and work always to heal the divisive conflict that has been destroying our world, beginning, of course, with our own hearts.

We can’t heal a conflict if we’re a part of it, if we have taken sides. So a big part of our healing work will be for each of us to become free of our attachments to one side or another of the many political, social, economic, and moral issues. Let them sort themselves out. God is working on them right now.

And if it helps, we can remember that it is the law of fate to prosper the modest.

Okay, the United States has just commemorated 9/11 again. Now we can begin to commemorate all those victims of the United States’ misguided attempt to lash back at someone, anyone, for what happened on 9/11. Somehow the United States forgot to turn the other cheek. Poor, sad, lonely Jesus.

Unfortunately they lashed out at the wrong folks, not once but twice – first in Iraq and then in Afghanistan. In so doing, they killed at least a half million folks, folks who did nothing to them, most of them women and children. And they’re still killing people in those countries today.

I can’t understand national chauvinism, not at all. We’re all people, each and every one of us here on planet earth (and on the space station too.) And any time one of us dies needlessly, we all lose something.

When the two children in that Iraqi family got sick and needed help, there was no medicine. The United States of 9/11 wasn’t letting anything like that into their country. The two children died, of course, and the parents grieved. In another house, where the wife waited and waited for her husband to come home, until she realized that he wasn’t ever coming home again and finally began to grieve too. So many stories. The folks in the United States weren’t the only ones who suffered and lost loved ones.

Let us grieve for all the folks who have been killed or who have lost a loved one in the many insane and unnecessary wars – wars for religion, wars for ideology, wars for territory, and even wars for revenge. And then there are wars to distract the citizens from the government’s failures at home, as well as wars to feed the little egos of those folks who think they have a right to tell the rest of us what to do.
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The truth of it is that these politicians and so-called leaders may occasionally be smart, but they are certainly not wise, not at all, not one of them. Also, by their very nature, they are dishonest and immoral and actually like war. They are certainly the ones who start them all. We would be wise to ignore them, especially during these dark days, made darker by their inept “leadership.”

We would do better to listen to and follow – if we must follow anyone – our spiritual brothers and sisters, our wise men and women. They have realized that with all this grief there must be just as much love. And they have learned to turn all this grief, for all the dead and all those left behind, into love. Let us open our hearts with theirs and see.

Last fall, I felt I was stuck I felt that something needed to happen, something that would free me to move ahead in my life. So I got out my old Angel Cards and asked about my life, what was happening, the long view.

The first card I received was Patience. I already knew patience. I’ve had to cultivate patience in order to be a good mommy-daddy these past eleven years. Also, because we have been so poor, I have had to be really patient about more money coming to us. I’ve had to be patient about more medicine and friends coming back into my life too.

The next card I received was Transformation. It was telling me that a big change was coming in my life, a transformative change. I knew I needed one. I needed something really profound to kick me in the ass, to get me moving again.

The next card I received wasWillingness. I took this card to be telling me that I had to be willing to accept whatever change was coming. If I didn’t accept it, it wouldn’t happen. I wondered at the time what it was that I would have to decide upon.

The next and final card seemed to address this issue. It was called Brotherhood. I understood from it that the transformation would involve my willingness to be more involved in some sort of collective world beyond my immediate family.
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This card reading occurred back last fall. And for a long while, nothing seemed to happen. I remembered though, and I was patient.

But recently I have begun to see some changes. We were just gifted with a van, and we sold our old car for a good price, much better than I had thought we’d get. So, some money has finally come to us, as well as a much better car. Also, Jake has applied, with our help, for SSI because of his Muscular Dystrophy. When he starts receiving this money, it will really help us.

Also, more folks have begun to come into my life, both old and new friends. And what has been most interesting to me is that they have all been acting as if I was helping them just by listening to their story. They have all been very open and sharing too, and when we have finished our visit, they have all said that I have helped them.

To tell the truth, I resisted this at first. I wasn’t at all sure that I wanted to fulfill this role for folks again. I had to step back and see that this was the transformation, that something between me and the universe had finally gotten straightened out, and, like Job, I was back in favor.

And then the pot was sweetened, so to speak, when one of these folks, an old and best friend, offered to share something that he had ran across, something that I was pleased to accept. I saw then that it was all tied together. I understood that I had to accept all these folks coming into my life with their needs for clarity and understanding. I had to be open to helping them and all the others who will probably be coming my way. I had to be willing to accept the transformation for it to happen.

The word Brotherhood excludes half of the human race. I would rather use the word Family. Clan or Tribe work too. Maybe a family will come out of this ongoing transformation. Aspen and I have been talking lately about living with other folks somewhere in a big house. It’s feeling like it’s time to gather. We already knew who some of the folks are that we would live with.
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This transformation that I am going through reminds me of that Hopi prophecy that the Elders in Oraibi put out several years ago. Reading it again helps me to understand this transformation that I’m going through. And I don’t think the prophecy is just about me. I have met many of you in the river.

The Hopi Elders say, “This could be a good time! There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold onto the shore. They will feel they are being torn apart and they will suffer greatly.

Know the river has its destination. The elders say we must let go of the shore, Push off into the middle of the river. Keep our eyes open and our heads above the water.

See who is in there with you and celebrate.

At this time in history, we are to take nothing personally. Least of all, ourselves. For the moment that we do, our spiritual growth and journey come to a halt.

The time of the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves!

Banish the word struggle from your attitude and vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

(For the entire prophecy, see the previous entry in “Notes from the Edge.)