August 11, 1999: An Opportunity To Heal Through The Heart

My exuberant article on the August 11, 1999 eclipse. Originally published in now-defunct Conscious Life magazine, and exceedingly relevant for our upcoming eclipse on 8/11/18:

  

Before our ripening millennial moment arrives, we’ll face another potent portal to either walk through or ignore: the total solar eclipse of August 11, 1999.

This is no run-of-the-sky eclipse. It’s a card-carrying galactic gateway. Astrological adepts have been waxing prophetic about the date's significance for a while; it also precedes, by just two days, the Aztec-prophesied "day of destiny."

What’s so special about this eclipse? If we’re willing to meet our celestial shadow at the level of metaphor, we’ll be insight.

Consider: the Moon blots out the light of the Sun. Perhaps our hidden, dark, or "feminine" side is asking our fiery, now-now-now, tick-tock, "masculine" energy to take a nap. The Moon signifies the night side, what’s unexplored within us, inviting receptivity, nurturing, allowing, rather than the solar-aggressive, "go-for-the-gold, the burn, the competitive edge" that plays out in our daily dramas.

Becoming One with Ourselves

Coming to wholeness — embodying our masculine and feminine energies, both within ourselves and as a planetary organism — is the quest and question of our time. First, are we willing to go there, and second, do we know how? It’s a call to alchemical union, this wedding of the light and the dark, and we could use a transformational map.

As a longtime student of ancient wisdom traditions, especially Mayan cosmology, I walk in both worlds, following an indigenous calendar that corresponds to seasonal and biorhythmic cycles, alongside our more linear Gregorian one. So I was intrigued to see what "natural time" might reveal about this auspicious access point. (The traditional Mayan symbols have been translated into modern equivalents, so decoding a day’s "energy" is like a game — it’s fun, and it expands one’s ways of thinking and perceiving.)

August 11, 1999 is an epiphany.

In the Mayan sacred calendar, August 11^thwill be a White Planetary Dog. The dog archetype is about loving through the heart, and loyalty — sounds a lot like "man's best friend", right?  

"Planetary", in this case, is a frequency, like a note on the musical scale. It’' the frequency of manifesting, and it vibrates to how we perfect ourselves in order to produce a desired outcome.

"White" is one of four colors that correspond to the four directions, the four elements, and our four "bodies" (physical, mental, emotional, spiritual). White is north and air, a dimension of mind.

Finally, each archetype has a guiding energy, like a wise teacher or mentor. The guide for White Planetary Dog is the Mirror, which of course is about inner and outer reflection. It also connotes endlessness (ever been in a funhouse hall of mirrors? Did you gain an enhanced perspective on where "you" end? Look deeply into the mirror…) The Mayans even have a saying that reflects the mirror: In Lakech, I am another yourself.

The complete energy for the day reads:

I perfect in order to love

Producing loyalty

I seal the process of heart

With the planetary tone of manifestation

I am guided by the power of endlessness.

Head Heart, Wholeness

It’s a fantastic window of opportunity calling to us. Listen: "Hello, humans! By connecting your head and your heart, you perfect your love. In so doing, you produce loyalty to one another and to the greater good, which will manifest as unending heart-centered love all over the planet!"

This is our possibility, our invitation, our initiation, our healing.

And this is the beauty of Truth: it doesn’t matter what vehicle takes you there. The message is always the same. Come home to yourself.  Remember the Love that you are. 

However it's expressed, there's a universality that’s unmistakable. Tears of recognition flood your eyes as you choose to see clearly, as you inhale back your authenticity and power.

You're unconditionally invited to join in the cosmic celebration on August 11^th, as the Moon of Communion eclipses all the old ways that no longer serve. Joy is waiting on the other side of the window. Let's ride the carrier wave of the frequency of the heart into the ocean of resonance with all that lives. You are Love. Let Freedom Ring!

© Copyright July 1999-2018 by Amara Rose. All rights reserved.

The Art of Awareness

As we move into the next phase of our global renaissance, copious creativity is the axis on which our elevation will turn. How deeply are we willing to tap our inner reservoirs? Can we expand our perception of what constitutes "art"?

Jose Argüelles, who adapted the evolutionary secrets of the Mayan Calendar for the Western mind, saw art as the unifying field, a path to help us move "from biospheric waste to artistic regeneration," by attuning ourselves to a natural time frequency expressed as an equation: T(E) = Art. Energy (E) factored by time (T) equals Art. Energy is essence: a rock, a flower, a star, a human being. Time is a frequency. When we use our energy in concert with natural time cycles, we are living creativity. In other words, Time is Art…not the clock on the wall or the cash in your wallet.

Eye of the Beholder

What this means in terms of cross-cultural energy exchange opens unimagined doors. A woman traveled from Denmark to the tiny West African country The Gambia, toting numerous colorful plastic bags — prized by Gambian women as symbols of status and respect — to use as barter. (Women of The Gambia also recycle worn or ripped plastic bags into one-of-a-kind purses).

In the marketplace, she discovered a hand-carved figure of an African goddess and, through gestures, opened negotiations to purchase the stunning piece.

But the indigenous artist had no interest in money. She wanted plastic bags. The Danish visitor tried to give her all the bags she'd brought, explaining that there was a surplus of these in her country. The Gambian sculptor accepted three, and each woman felt she'd enjoyed the better bargain. Plastic bags or a unique woodcarving: equally sacred art in the eye of the beholder.

Then there is the children's book that became a collaboration between two Jewish translators, a Protestant editor, a Muslim painter and a non-profit publisher in the deep South. It was a collective endeavor all the way, explained one rabbinical writer: "An Arabic Sufi tale (originally penned in what is now Iraq) translated by a rabbi into Hebrew in the Middle Ages and translated by us (into 21^st century language and sensibility), with a Sufi publisher and a Pakistani artist." The subject matter — animals protesting their treatment by humans — transcended all ethnic, cultural, and religious boundaries.

The Art in our DNA

The universal urge toward the aesthetic is coded in our cells. Theologian and author Thomas Moore writes, in Care of the Soul, "Children paint every day and love to show their works on walls and refrigerator doors. But as we become adults, we abandon this important soul task of childhood." When we relinquish this soul expression to professional artists, "we are left with mere rational reasons for our lives, feelings of emptiness and confusion, and a compulsive attachment to pseudo images, such as shallow television programs. When our own images no longer have a home, a personal museum, we drown our sense of loss in pale substitutes, trashy novels or formulaic movies."

Because art arrests our attention, living "artfully" might require of us something as simple as pausing: taking the time to shift from acquire to inquire, to let go of buying more in favor of being more. This is what honoring our collective creative impulse can do for humanity: restore us to wholeness, holiness, health. "Whole", "holy" and "heal" all spring from the same root. To be whole is to be balanced and harmonious in body, mind, soul and spirit.

It's this level of awareness that will characterize the coming Psychozoic ("spirit life") era, says Argüelles, when, having rediscovered who we are, we can create a culture based on the three virtues of true time: autonomy, equality, and loyalty to the truth in every moment. These are strikingly similar to the Three Commitments delineated by The Reconnections: stay free, stay present, follow the energy.

We already have fusion food: a culinary blending of cultures to delight the palate. Now we're primed to feed our deeper hunger, to fuse mind and heart into healing art, and reawaken the sacred dimension in daily life.

And if we make a subtle shift — move the "h" in heart from the start of the word to the end — we create "Earth". We live in a heart circle. Earth heart. The beat goes on.

Birthing a New World: As Above, So Below

I've been playing with the Mayan Calendar since it first engaged me on my awakening journey 15 years ago, yet I NEVER grasped the incredible cosmic connection Gregg Braden elucidates in his compelling new book, Deep Truth: Igniting the Memory of Our Origin, History, Destiny and Fate. Braden says the Mayan sacred cycle of 260 days, known as the Tzol'kin, approximates the length of a human pregnancy — this much I knew. But he then points out how this 260-day cycle is a fractal (a pattern that is the same at every scale) of the grander 26,000-year cycle that is now concluding: the precession of the equinoxes. 

This is the true value of Mayan calendrics: they provided a "map" of what to expect; it's only been our inability to correctly decode it that has led many people to believe the world is "ending." Cycles do not end; they simply repeat, albeit at a higher level along life's spiral. This is why our birth, and Earth's rebirth, are One.

Braden writes: "The Maya knew that for each birth, the conditions would shift to make way for the new life. In the case of world-age cycles, the shift is the breakdown of things that don't work in the face of the changes, in order to make way for the things that do. This is precisely the way our indigenous ancestors thought of our time in history: as a cosmic birth into a new cycle of life."

He goes on to explain how in light of this awareness, we can better understand that "the world of the mid-20^th century was a stepping-stone, a point inaugurating a learning curve, which has led us to another way of life. We can't stop the change, but we can guide it to a gentler landing.

"This is where Deep Truth comes in. We're all better equipped to make the choices that define our future when we understand the cycles, failures and successes of our past."

I highly recommend this book. Braden's scientifically supported findings will blow your circuits on many levels, such as: humans did not induce climate change — but we ARE responsible for creating a sustainable environment now! — and, perhaps even more astounding: we are not a product of evolution, but of an intelligent design (ID) put into place at once.

Never before has the aphorism, "We are the ones we've been waiting for" been so abundantly clear.

What the Upcoming Eclipse Can Teach Us About Torture

There's something more insidious than any malevolence we inflict on others: what we do to ourselves, using the one instrument of torture that's available to everyone, every day: our minds.

We become adept at berating ourselves for imperfections, whether physical, mental, or emotional: Why don't I weigh less/earn more/control my temper/have more friends/attract a lover/have a great job…? And that's just for starters.

However, we're living in a fulcrum moment for quantum change. This is the time that's been prophesied for millennia as the Turning of the Age, and so it is. The Mayans were correct, although not as those who interpret their calendars through a linear lens believe: the world is not ending; a world age is. We are moving into a time of consciousness, which is what their calendars measure: human evolution on a vast scale, which in one sense is time. But neither the world nor the calendar "end"; we simply continue, albeit at a higher level along life's spiral.

The upcoming solar eclipse on May 20^th, followed by the Venus transit June 5-6^th, offers us a slightly-more-than-two-week window of omnipresent opportunity. While being in the actual path of the eclipse will enhance its potency, there is no one on Earth who will not be affected — and profoundly changed, whether you're aware of it or not. Anyone who is incarnate now is de facto part of the shift, so no matter what your life "looks like", this is one area in which you can surrender the whip: if you're here, you're helping the planet and all her inhabitants to transform. Thanks for agreeing to play your essential part.

And there are multiple levels working. A few luminous takes on the eclipse include the current newsletter of Gillian Macbeth Louthan, whose Quantum Awakening site has been a beacon for 26 years and counting; this message from the Star Elders through Aluna Joy and this brilliant piece on the esoteric aspects of aligning with our Great Central Sun, Alcyone, in the Pleiades. I expand upon these topics in my own inspirational newsletter, What Shines. You can read the current issue on the Venus transit in Second Rock from the Sun, and a reprint of the eclipse issue on SpiritCrossing.org: Down to Earth.

A personal ah-ha: According to the 13-Moon Calendar (interwoven with the Mayan sacred calendar known as the Tzol'kin), which helps us attune with natural rhythms and return to biospheric alignment, the eclipse takes place on a 5Eb day. Eb, or Yellow Magnetic Human, happens to be my galactic signature/solar seal, which means it is my personal Mayan "sign". Each solar seal also has a "guide", and on 5Eb, the guiding energy is (drumroll): the Sun! (The Sun is one of the 20 Mayan solar seals; its Mayan name is Ahau). So, do I feel internally held and guided by the imminent eclipse on May 20^th?  You know it!

Finally, for all of us regardless of solar signature: each month in the 13-Moon Calendar consists of 28 days, or one moon cycle, and is thus referred to as a Moon, also carrying a specific energy. The life-altering May 20^th eclipse takes place during the Spectral Moon of Liberation, whose core question/action is: "How do I release and let go?" And the totem animal is the Serpent.

We're evolving Eden anew. This article delineates each of the 13 Moon inquiries: Embracing Paradox Can Help You Beat the Clock and this web page introduces you to each Mayan glyph in depth.

One more piece: The sacred Mayan cycle known as the Tzol'kin is 260 days long: the same cycle as Venus, and also the exact length of a human pregnancy! I expand upon these themes exponentially in my e-course for women on awakening to the Divine Feminine and celebrating life in a female body, Loving Our Lunacy.

So, dearhearts, let us release our attraction to suffering and free ourselves from self-inflicted torment to rise in love, eclipsing what no longer serves our growth, both individually and collectively, as we allow the planet of love to bathe us in her radiance and complete our journey into a greater awareness and allowance of union than we've ever known.

Blessed Be!

Scared to Sacred: Falling in Love with 13

In high school English I learned a 64-carat word for a common ailment: triskaidekaphobia, "fear of the number thirteen." The elevator in my grandparents' apartment building omitted the thirteenth floor. Apparently the assumption was, nobody would have wanted to live on it. It was a fashionable New York City address; fear and loathing cross all perceived boundaries. I also recall a series of horror movies with "Friday the 13th" in the title.

A society steeped in superstition and a materialistic value system will find it easy to assign anxiety to anything that threatens the status quo. Thirteen is the number of movement, of change — a wild card — and that can be very scary. But it's our lost connection with the Divine in everyday life that gives rise to such distress. Divorced from our origins, terrified of our own power, we profane the sacred: thirteen becomes unlucky, evil, a curse; symbolic scapegoat of all we're afraid to embrace.

When we can take the thirteenth step, however, we're on the first step of the Stairway to Heaven. With the courage to look, we find thirteen stitched into the very fabric of our culture. Thirteen colonies gave birth to a nation. The first American flag bore thirteen stars and stripes. We were on the right track back then, grounded into the roots of our heritage.

Think about it: thirteen has traditionally been cause for celebration. The thirteenth year signifies a coming-of-age, also across all perceived boundaries. In the Jewish religion, boys make their Bar Mitzvah at thirteen. This ceremony, which involves reading from the holy Torah, marks a boy's entrance into manhood.

Girls generally begin to menstruate at thirteen. Cross-culturally, it's common to commemorate the first blood with an initiation rite; here in the West, this significant threshold is at last beginning to be recognized as a powerful, sacred passage. (My e-course, Loving Our Lunacy, is an embodied initiation for all women.)

In fact, there are even thirteen sun signs in the Real Solar Zodiac — which is not the one used in conventional astrology. Ophiucus, the serpent bearer, has been omitted from the oversimplified Tropical Zodiac used in the West. Yet the serpent denotes transformation — and on the Winter Solstice of 2012, Earth will be directly aligned with both Ophiucus and the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

Thirteen, then, is a fundamental Earth rhythm, manifested in our physical bodies as well as the heavenly ones. To reject thirteen is, perhaps, to reject or deny some core aspect of ourselves as human beings.

How can we reawaken to our true purpose and potential, beyond the fear and perception of separateness? By reclaiming our native knowing.


One way that resonates for me is following a 13 Moon Calendar. The 13 Moon Calendar shows us a path to walk to restore right relationship in our lives, to re-member (make membership again) our journey as one Earth family. Based on an annual solar cycle of 13 moons (months) of 28 days each (the female menstrual cycle), plus one "day out of time" in which to reflect and regenerate, the 13 Moon Calendar is synchronized with Earth rhythms and human biology. It's expansive, intuitive, juicy, flowing: life, in all its harmonious chaos.

The beauty of this apparent paradox lies in learning to honor the both/and: life is orderly and messy, pragmatic and unpredictable, spiritual and material. Living in tune with these innate contradictions, we breathe in our own magnificence, and feel nourished and held in the body of the Great Mother.

Our Gregorian calendar, by contrast, models scarcity, so we always subtly feel we're starving: if you get what you need, there might not be enough for me. Living a compressed, alienating, sterile existence, our spiritual lungs squeezed for air, we evince these invisible shackles in the way we treat each other and Gaia. Time-is-money, me-first, bigger-better-best, I want it yesterday, are the credos of mechanistic time. Pursued by the clock, separated from our humanity, we've forgotten that time is creativity, that women carry time in their bodies, and have come to accept the clock as king.

Another Earth-based analogy may also help: I've observed a fairly rampant homeowner disgust with the "lowly dandelion", scourge of suburbia's well-manicured lawns — when in fact, dandelion is one of the most healing herbs available to humanity, offering itself in abundance wherever we dwell. It's a supreme liver tonic, known to help detoxify the body's "processing plant." If you want to release that pent-up rage in a healthy way, the remedy is probably available, free and easy, right in your own backyard.

Dandelion is so plentiful that I find it also acts as de facto compost within me: surrounding and helping to decompose back into rich loam that which no longer serves. Yet we curse the weed and uproot it, spray poison to keep the green carpet unsullied. When we can stop "livin' for the lawn," focusing predominantly on the external, and make the subtle shift from ego mind to Universal Mind, we see with such great clarity the incredible gifts all around us.

In the 13 Moon Calendar, the number thirteen, like dandelion, grows everywhere; it's the key thread on which the harmony of the calendar is woven. And on a 13 Moon Calendar, there's always a Friday the 13th — in a 28-day month, every second Friday is Friday the thirteenth!

Astrologer Judith Goldberg offers an additional planet-positive note for this Friday the 13th: Mars, which has been retrograde since January 23rd, goes direct. Judy writes:

"Demonstrating an auspicious sense of timing, Mars entered the sign of Virgo, the healer, on 11/11/11. It began its bi-annual retrograde motion on January 23rd, 2012, the day of the Chinese New Year. Usually transiting in a sign for a few weeks, because of the lengthy retrograde, Mars residence in Virgo lasted 5 months until it turns direct on Friday, April 13th. Each of these movements of the red planet takes on an added significance because of these cultural, spiritual or energetic synchronicities. Now, as Mars turns direct, we are in a 5-day period between April 12th and 17th, that is a powerful energetic nexus, or core, which greatly enhances spiritual practices.

"This is the perfect time for daily meditation to open yourself to the highest possibilities that will take you into your best new direction. With Mars direct it is time to begin taking action again, to turn those possibilities into new realities. In fact, the remainder of the year between now and the Solstice is a fulcrum point, a time when we can gain the necessary leverage to do the heavy lifting that will facilitate new changes in our personal lives, in our collective reality and propel mankind and Planet Earth into the Age of Aquarius."

As our evolutionary readiness dissolves old superstition around the number thirteen — and all it represents — our collective mindfield makes a quantum leap from mindless fear to aware acceptance of thirteen as the sacred number of the spiral, the energy of kundalini awakening, the step to transformation and growth. Unified in time, living on purpose, a metamorphosis occurs as we attune to a higher frequency.

Metamorphosis means going above, beyond what existed before. The Sufi mystic Rumi said, "Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing there's a field; I'll meet you there." In this quantum field, we midwife moth into butterfly. Scared into sacred. Each of us into our true purpose and potential.

What is this time of profound transmutation helping you bring to birth? Whatever it is, may it be in beauty, for the greatest good of all.

The Beginning of the World

"To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour."

~ Auguries of Innocence, William Blake

Have you been feeling a sense of urgency for a while — as though an invisible undertow is pulling you in over your head? The Hopi prophecy about these times begins, "There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and so swift that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold on to the shore…"

We are all swimming in an emergent sea of consciousness — and, since this is so new, we may tend to fall back on old models to try to understand what's happening. "Oh! This must be an emergency!" Remember that emergency equates to crisis — and crisis means turning point. Emergence (minus the "y", or "why," of our scrambling, questioning minds) means to come out, to gush forth — like flowing waters. The cosmic comic Swami Beyondananda calls it, "Emerge and see." Let's take a slow, luminous look at where we are now.

September 11, 2001 was a wake-up call, our planetary initiation into a higher way of being. If 9-1-1 was the conception, our global gestation has been underway for the past decade. Because we've never experienced a global birth process before, there's no template for how to do it, or what it might look or feel like. Some of us are responding with hyperactivity; others are exhausted; we may fluctuate between the two. Some people are feeling ravenous all the time; others have little or no appetite. An expectant mother knows that the baby growing inside her affects all aspects of her life for the nine months she carries the being in her womb.

How strange and wonderful to be part of a collective birth, a worldwide rebirth of consciousness, here in the body of our Earth Mother! On October 28, 2011, the 26,000-year cycle of the Mayan Calendar concludes, initiating us into a higher dimension. (This evolution is also affecting animals, especially cats, which are helping to anchor the vibration of transmutation.) The more we can take care of ourselves and of one another as we prepare for our emergence, the more joy-full it can be.

Once again, a subtle shift in perception may help. Consider the word n-o-w-h-e-r-e. It's usually pronounced "no where." If we subtlely shift our focus, however, we arrive at the key to living in the present moment, which is where all gifts reside: now here.

This is a new dawn, our collective inauguration. The word inauguration contains the word "augur," which means to predict, to forecast. What do we want to vote for, as a planetary people, in this ripe moment of rebirth? What augurs well for our growth as a species? Blake's "Auguries of Innocence," quoted above, suggests one positive pathway.

Lammas: Playing With Fire

New Moon in Leo. The start of the Fifth Day of the 9th (and final) wave of the Mayan Calendar. The U.S. debt deadline. Mercury retrograde (until August 26th). And oh, yes, Lammas, the potent cross-quarter gateway that heralds the Harvest.

Any way you slice it, this weekend lobs us an energetic fireball. Yet fire, like all elements, both creates and destroys. As someone who's been intimate with Kali, I understand what it's like to sit in the cauldron as it bubbles, feeling your old skin burn away. Not necessarily pleasant, but … a grand opportunity to restore balance, further along life's spiral.

Astrologer Allison Rae suggests we take "Big Baby Steps," because (I love this): "Evolution is not a spectator sport." Mercury Rx invites us to release/reimagine/recreate, before moving into the new in September.

So invoke Kali (or the destroyer/creator God/Goddess/energy of your choice), welcome the discomfort, let the worn-out ways burn clean in the crucible of truth and possibility, and prepare to start anew from pure marrow.

That's playing with fire!

Day Out of Time — Forgive Debt, Celebrate Possibility!

How intriguing that Obama says we are "out of time" when it comes to the economy and debt relief. He's absolutely correct, albeit on a meta-level he's not consciously aware of:

Monday, July 25th, heralds the annual "Day Out of Time" on the Thirteen Moon/28-day Calendar — a calendar on which every Friday is a lucky Friday the 13th! Breaking old paradigms and belief systems, the Thirteen Moon Calendar is aligned with natural rhythms and human biology, enabling us to access fourth dimensional frequencies by reciting each day's "energy signature". These daily affirmations (260 in all, referred to as "kin") work on an intuitive level.

What, then, is the Day Out of Time (also known as Green Day)? Here's a summary from the Foundation for the Law of Time.

Around the planet, this day is reserved for festival and community. Central focuses are: Planetary Peace through Culture, 'Time Is Art!', forgiveness, atonement, freeing of debts, purification, and the Art of Peace.

Celebrated annually since 1992, the Day Out of Time always falls on July 25th. On the Thirteen Moon Calendar, this day is not a day of the month. It is a day in between the closing of the previous year (July 24th) and the dawning of the new year on July 26th. The official flag for the Day Out of Time is the Banner of Peace.

The Day Out of Time is a day to celebrate "Time Is Art". This is what hundreds of thousands of people who follow the new calendar do every year on Gregorian calendar July 25th. And since art is the basis of constructive peace, this day is also celebrated as International Peace through Culture Day. Peace through culture is a fundamental premise of the Thirteen Moon/28-day Calendar. When you celebrate time is art you are promoting peace through culture.

Here's an article about How to See Yourself As An Artist, and one about how, by using the questions of the 13 Moons, Embracing Paradox Can Help You Beat the Clock.

The energy signature for Monday, July 25, 2011 is Red Overtone Skywalker, and sounds like this:

I empower in order to explore
Commanding wakefulness
I seal the output of space

With the overtone tone of radiance
I am guided by the power of birth.

On this Day Out of Time, we can join kin around the world in deepening our commitment to the truth that Time is Art, and that we can free ourselves from the oppression and confusion of the frequency of mechanized time. As we liberate ourselves from its distortions, we are awakening from the 5000-year spell of his-story, re-membering (making membership again) our connection to the galactic time magic residing in every human heart. And from this connection, true prosperity can flower.

In this time of reinventing resources (and expanding our resource-full-ness), Caroline Casey says of the U.S. economic crisis, "All debts are off!" And Jaison Starkes agrees: "Debts are an agreement on an old story."

The Law of Time site says: "Give the human a harmonious standard of measure and then a harmonious human will walk a harmonious mile.

Harmony ~ that's what the day of time is all about."

Summer Solstice: An Opportunity to Become More Whole

Summer Solstice celebrates the sun at the peak of its power. Both the sun (male energy) and the moon (female energy) are waxing, or increasing, now. June 21st marks the longest day and shortest night of the year, in the northern hemisphere. (Winter Solstice for our southern hemisphere allies). It's a stillpoint. A time to reflect. A potent moment to set your intention, because the manifestation momentum is strong.

The day goes by many names: All-Couples Day, Feast of Epona, Gathering Day, Midsummer, Litha, Vestalia. In ancient times, June was a popular marriage month, since summer offered a window between the sowing and reaping seasons. The June full moon was considered the best time to harvest honey from the hives, and newlyweds were fed honey during the wedding feast to encourage love and fertility. The tradition lives on in our modern post-nuptial getaway, the honeymoon.

How might we translate our ancestors' emphasis on love and union at Solstice to our lives today? In other words, how can we best live this light?

It's a grand opportunity to burn away old patterns that no longer serve our highest good, in order to become more whole. Whole, holy and heal originate from the same root. We can use the power of Solstice to assist us in integrating the masculine and feminine energies inside ourselves. The moment is ripe for sacred reunion. What do I mean by this?

Most books, films and songs that speak of love refer to romantic love between two people. We've been taught to look outside ourselves for completion, to seek the Other and to rejoice when we connect, or to keep searching.

What we're really seeking is a part of ourselves, which is why we often feel incomplete when we hook up with someone whom we hope will fill the empty place inside us. The wedding of the light and the dark, of the magnetic, receptive, lunar, "feminine" self and the dynamic, assertive, solar, "masculine" self, has to take place first within our own being. And yet — it's through relationship that we get there!

The beloved is a catalyst to help us merge the complementary aspects of ourselves. This is a radical idea, and challenging to hold. It turns everything we believe about romantic love on its head.

One of the ways to shine your own light more brightly is to celebrate yourself and each other, through whatever art forms call to you: music, dance, poetry, painting, comedy improvisation, theatre, ritual, chanting/singing, multimedia … and silence. Enlarge the lens you look through by asking, how can I expand this experience, become inclusive rather than exclusive?

This Summer Solstice, I invite you to sound the clarion call for your own companions of destiny — those who can see and honor your authentic self. The Mayan Oracle (a book and card deck based on the Mayan sacred calendar) says, "When you have been truly seen, you feel empowered, and remembrance of a shared sacred trust is ignited."

Acknowledge your connection with all life, and allow the simple to nourish you. Sitting beneath a tree, enjoying the sun on your feet and the wind in your hair, being thankful for life itself, is wholeness exemplified. The romance of living — and the wedding — begins first within you.

The 7th Day of the Mayan Galactic Underworld Begins!

On November 3rd we entered the 7th and final "day" of the Mayan Calendar, which takes us up to its momentous conclusion in this time-space continuum, the much-lauded 2012. According to Mayan scholar Carl Johan Calleman, the end date is actually October 2011. But we're quibbling about minutiae when dealing with cycles so vast: on a scale of 26,000 years (the Mayan long count), 2011 or 2012 makes little difference. Besides, the Maya were not using our Gregorian calendar, but indigenous cycles aligned with the seasons and the stars.

The particular passage is all about balance: fully embodying the feminine after millennia of masculine dominance, and allowing both our bodies and our planetary body to come into wholeness and fusion.

This is not about masculine and feminine as they apply to gender distinctions, but to the energies we all carry: masculine being synonymous with dynamic, assertive, solar, outward, yang energy, and feminine synonymous with magnetic, receptive, lunar, inner, yin energy. Wedding the light and the dark within ourselves is the beginning of sacred reUnion for us all.

For more information on Mayan Calendrics, here's the piece I wrote a year ago when we entered the 6th Night: The Sky Is Falling ~ NOT! The Truth About 2012.

The Shift in Human Consciousness

Unless you've been inhabiting one of Jupiter's moons lately, it won't likely be news that humanity is in the midst of a massive evolutionary upgrade. In a brilliant 2-part article that is also available as a radio interview, Sol Luckman discusses the manifold aspects of this shift, from the implications of the Mayan Calendar 2012 end date to the significance of spirals to the Law of One. I highly recommend reading both articles (or listening to the show), slowly, allowing the information to seep into your cellular awareness.

Here's an excerpt:

"The spiral is the sign of the eternal, creative, unifying and organizing force or principle at work in the universe, and especially of the ongoing creation of consciousness. It is a divine mark on nature, what may be termed God's personal signature on the cosmos, the Great Architect's own autograph—from the cradles of stars and planets in the awesome spiral arms of galaxies to the beautiful double helix structure of the DNA molecule [...] As the spiral seems to be integral to physical growth, so it is also the symbolic pattern of human spiritual growth ... [T]he spiral is as much part of our 'cultural' DNA as it is part of our biological DNA [...] Indeed, I have come to realize that 'spirality'—the condition of being spiral—and 'reality' are almost interchangeable terms.

"Recalling the aether theories of Kozyrev, fellow Russian scientist Sergey Smelyakov's research demonstrates that the harmonic vibrations of Phi, also referred to as the Golden Mean and Fibonacci sequence, inform the very fabric of space-time. Mathematically, the Photon Band appears to be structured on Phi, producing set cosmic intervals the Maya apparently were aware of when constructing their uncannily accurate calendar. Smelyakov's The Auric Time Scale and the Mayan Factor compellingly suggests that Earth connects to Galactic Center via our solar system in a harmonic, fractal fashion he calls 'Solar-planetary Synchronism,' a vibratory relationship based on the Golden Mean.

"In an article entitled The Ultimate Secret of the Mayan Calendar, Wilcock analyzes Smelyakov's research, writing that it helps explain the end of the Mayan calendar in geometric terms as an 'infinitely-converging end point' in which time appears to 'collapse.' This is because time as we experience it follows the imploding spirals of Phi much like a finger tracing the cyclical involutions of a conch shell to its centerpoint.

"A salient point in the evolutionary model I am elaborating here is that evolution of species ultimately is driven not by material, but by metaphysical energy, or consciousness, of a spiraling, 'meta-genetic' nature.

"Swedish Biologist Carl Johan Calleman reaches precisely the same conclusion in The Mayan Calendar and the Transformation of Consciousness, cautioning 'against a narrow interpretation of the term cyclical. The Mayan calendar describes evolutionary rather than strictly cyclical processes, so history is more like a spiral of evolution, in which similar types of events are favored at certain points in the cycle.'"

Friday the 13th: "Oh No!" or "Wow!"?

It's Friday the 13th here in the USA, a transformational gateway, as 13 always is ~ if we can transcend the superstition around the number.

Here's an excerpt from an article I wrote as part of a series on the Mayan Calendar and living on natural time. If you'd like the longer piece as a Word doc, please email me.

Scared To Sacred: A Subtle Shift
In high school English I learned a 64-carat word for a common ailment: triskaidekaphobia, "fear of the number thirteen." The elevator in my grandparents' apartment building omitted the thirteenth floor. I also recall a series of horror movies with "Friday the 13th" in the title.

A society steeped in superstition and consumerism finds it easy to assign anxiety to anything that threatens the status quo. Thirteen is the number of movement, of change—a wild card—and that can be very scary. If we feel divorced from our origins, terrified of our own power, we profane the sacred: thirteen becomes unlucky, symbolic scapegoat of all we're afraid to embrace.

When we can take the thirteenth step, however, we're on the first step of the Stairway to Heaven. With the courage to look, we find thirteen stitched into the very fabric of our culture. Thirteen colonies gave birth to a nation. Cross-culturally, the thirteenth year signifies a coming-of-age. In the Jewish religion, a Bar Mitzvah ceremony at thirteen marks a boy's entrance into manhood. Girls generally begin to menstruate at thirteen, an embodied initiation.

Thirteen, then, is a fundamental Earth rhythm, biorhythm. To reject thirteen is, perhaps, to reject some core aspect of ourselves as human beings.

We can heal this perceived split by reclaiming our native knowing. One way that resonates for me is following a Thirteen-Moon Calendar, woven together with the Mayan Sacred Tzol'kin. The Thirteen Moon Calendar shows us a path to walk to restore right relationship in our lives, to re-member (make membership again) our journey as one family of origin. Based on an annual solar cycle of 13 moons (months) of 28 days each (the feminine cycle), this calendar is synchronized with nature and human biology. It's expansive, intuitive, juicy, flowing: life, in all its harmonious chaos. The beauty of this apparent paradox lies in learning to honor the both/and: life is orderly and messy, spiritual and material. Living in tune with these innate contradictions, we breathe in our own magnificence, and feel nourished and held in the body of the Great Mother.

Our Gregorian calendar, by contrast, models scarcity, so we always subtly feel like we're starving: if you get what you need, there might not be enough for me. Living a compressed, alienating existence, our spiritual lungs squeezed for air, we evince these invisible shackles in the time-is-money, me-first, bigger-better-best credos of mechanistic time. Pursued by the clock, we've forgotten that time is creativity, that women carry time in their bodies, and have accepted the clock as king.

José Argüelles, author of The Mayan Factor, who deciphered the evolutionary course correction embedded in the Mayan mathematical codes, calls false time "Satan's last curse." One awakening soul, hearing this, suggested to Argüelles that the first twelve moons of the Thirteen-Moon Calendar are like the twelve disciples of Christ, and the thirteenth moon is Christ himself. This has nothing to do with religious dogma or superstition; it is the timbre of Truth: by following the Thirteen-Moon and Mayan Calendars, returning to true time and the ever-evolving, life-giving essence of the natural world, we all get to participate in the Christ principle.

As our collective mindfield moves from mindless fear to aware acceptance of thirteen as the sacred number of transformation and growth, a metamorphosis occurs. Metamorphosis means going beyond what existed before. Rumi said, "Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there's a field; I'll meet you there." In this quantum field we midwife moth into butterfly. Scared into sacred. Each of us into our true purpose and potential.

What is this time of great transmutation helping you bring to birth? Whatever it is, may it be in beauty, for the greater good of all. Blessed Be!

A Question of Balance

Mayan time cycles maven Li Walter, PhD, says we're entering into a balancing act as we prepare to close out 2008, and it's an opportunity for integration on all levels:

"Coming in the Moon of Balance, this is a journey to find a new balance in our lives and in our society.

With so many planets in Capricorn at the moment, including the New Moon in Capricorn (and Sun in Capricorn) on 1 Skywalker (Saturday, Dec. 27th), this is clearly a journey in fundamentally re-balancing and re-structuring how we live. Mars and Pluto in early Capricorn provide some push, while Jupiter and Mercury in late Capricorn help to pull us toward the possibilities of Aquarius.

On Dec. 31st, Saturn in Virgo goes retrograde until mid-May, so here too we are given the indication that a practical re-working of how we work is in order. Also that night, just after sunset you can see the crescent Moon with Venus in the southwest and Mercury with Jupiter very low in the west.

January 1st falls on a 6 Mirror portal day, so here again is a call to reflect upon balance, and allow more balanced perceptions to lead us into the year to come.

This Skywalking journey toward greater balance manifests on the 10 Wind day on Jan. 3rd as Jupiter moves into Aquarius for the next year. It's time to take a big breath. Jupiter is much more comfortable here, able to go big, take risks, expand into the exploration of innovative possibilities.

And just on the very last day of this Moon, the World-bridger wave connects this new balancing into the attunement of Moon 7 to come. Moving from balance as we bridge different worlds is vital, whether between our personal world and another's, between work and home life, or between this dimension and others."

November 13th: A Quantum Leap in Conscious Evolution

According to the Mayan Calendar, which serves as a template for the state of humanity's evolution, we are at a major shift point: on Thursday, November 13, 2008, we collectively enter what Mayan scholar Carl Calleman has termed the 6th Day (or time period) of the 8th Cycle of Creation. Calleman speaks of this time as a shifting point, from chaos and upheaval to a more enlightened global consciousness. It lasts until November 7, 2009, when time accelerates even faster, and we enter Day 7.

The entrance to Day 6 signals a year of enormous breakthroughs in the evolution of consciousness. "Days" in Calleman's penetrating model of the Mayan calendar are times of fruition of seeds planted during the preceding phase or "Night."


In an article published in DNA Monthly entitled "The Real Meaning of the Mayan Calendar," Anthony Goodman writes, "Unlike other calendars, [the Mayan calendar as decoded by Calleman] does not time astronomical bodies. It is purely a calendar, a timeline, of the Evolution of Consciousness. The calendar comprises nine discreet cycles of creation, nested within each other, all ending on a particular date. That date, believed by Calleman to be October 28, 2011, as opposed to the more well-known date of December 21, 2012, is when this phase of conscious evolution ends and a transformation in consciousness takes place."

Interestingly, both Ken Carey in The Starseed Trilogy and Ra in The Law of One cite 2011, as opposed to 2012, as the most probable date for the "discontinuous mega-event" (to quote David Wilcock) that both often refer to as the Harvest. In addition, Barbara Hand Clow, author of The Mayan Code: Time Acceleration and Awakening the World Mind (one of the most electrifying books I've read about human evolution!), is one of numerous scholars and indigenous wisdom keepers who support of Calleman's interpretation of the Mayan calendar, including its less well-known end date.

On November 13th, I'm participating in Global Potentiation Day, a free opportunity to clear our energy fields and elevate our growth exponentially. I urge you to join me. As the creators of this event write, "We can think of no better way to facilitate the success of the 6th Day, individually and collectively, than to bring people together in order to bless this new beginning through the act of Potentiation."

Changing of the Guard

Astrologers everywhere are talking about it: on Tuesday, November 4th, Saturn (planet of form and structure, symbolic of "the way things are") and Uranus (the irrepressible bolt-from-the-blue, which might best be symbolized by extreme sports!) are in exact opposition, a perfect representation of just what this historic U.S. election is bringing to the fore worldwide.

We also complete the latest round of the 260-day Mayan sacred calendar tomorrow. Mayan timekeeper Li Walter explains succinctly:

"With Saturn in Virgo exactly opposing Uranus in Pisces, it's the old guard and the new-approach in opposition, so there's both change and resistance happening. This is the story of the concrete meeting the energetic to work out their relationship. Saturn in Virgo conjoins two earth-oriented, time-conscious, practical doers. While Uranus, which brings forth stormy, electrical energies, and is associated with timing and the sudden or unexpected, will be in the vast, mystical, non-local realms of Pisces. Storm and Earth engaged. Coming in the Moon of Form, within us there is a struggle between old forms and structures and innovative new approaches, and this dynamic is showing up in the political arena as well. There will be five passes of this Saturn/Uranus opposition between now and July 2010, so this change will be worked through again and again, deepening each time."

And Jeff Jawer observes, "The long-term struggle between preserving the past and creating a new future will continue, on and off, until July 10 of next year. Each of us is likely to be pulled between these apparently contradictory forces, wondering whether to hold tight to the limits of current reality or to venture forth to invent a new one. Political and personal polarization can be expected, but the good news is that this process can also provide a chance to meet responsibilities (Saturn) in new and different ways (Uranus) and to provide a solid foundation (Saturn) to support fresh concepts (Uranus). It's easy to fall into the trap of feeling that you must choose between sides when, in fact, the real work is to build bridges between these seemingly opposing forces."

So let's grow with the flow, dear ones! For more on this theme, read my November newsletter about the role of the color purple in our lives at this exceptional time: State of Our Union.

Learning to Fly

Aluna Joy shares a fascinating story of meeting a Butterfly Man on her recent tour to Palenque, and learning about the Butterfly Heart: "... an activated butterfly heart [enables star beings to] live in this world and the starry world at the same time. With the butterfly heart, they could have the courage to come to the Earth, explore its beauty, and study its nature without concern about being forever Earthbound ...

"Tzutujil Mayans in Guatemala speak of simultaneous Twin Realities: the world of dreams and the world of work. These worlds are likened to the opposing wings of a Butterfly: the dream world is one wing, and the awake world is the other. They believe the wings must connect at the Heart for the Butterfly to fly and live. Real life occurs because of the interaction of the wings. The Life is the Butterfly's Heart. Life, like the Butterfly's Heart, is kept alive by the two opposing, mirroring, twinlike wings."

What fascinated Aluna and me as well is what Deepak Chopra says about how the human Butterfly Heart is our source of flight: in The Book of Secrets, he writes: ... "Two chemicals called actin and myosin evolved eons ago to allow the muscles in insect and butterfly wings to contract and relax. Thus butterflies and insects learned to fly. When one of these paired molecules is absent, wings will grow but they cannot flap and are therefore useless. Today, the same two proteins are responsible for the beating of the human heart, and when one is absent, the person's heartbeat is inefficient and weak, ultimately leading to heart failure ...

"In our hearts, we feel the impulse to fly, to break free of boundaries. Isn't that the same impulse nature expressed when insects began to take flight?"

Intriguingly, a book that found me when I was entering my dark night of the soul ~ in essence, seeking my spiritual wings ~ was Flight Lessons, by Michael Hall. A lively journey to conscious evolution as a couple: learning to fly.