Two friends and I sit by the fire together on the full moon.This month the full moon coincided with Dia de Los Muertos which falls just after Halloween, which is its turn replaced the more ancient Samhain. In most cultures marking this particular turn of the year, the veil between the worlds is thought to be thinnest, allowing easy contact with the ancestors.

So we welcomed the ancestors to our fire and we listened, pads and pens in hand.

My first guest was a very tall thin woman with bobbed hair and elegant clothing from the 1930's. I asked her what we needed to do to prepare for the coming transition. Her response:

Just release it all - let go - and you'll be provided for. Everything is already there but you don't see it. There is enough if you believe there is enough. Only the ones who do not believe there is enough will not have enough.

We have always provided and we will continue to provide if only you can see what it is we are giving.

You are facing in the wrong direction. Face the sun and the sun will give. The cycle goes on even into another phase: a phase of forthrightness, of courage, of listening, of giving, of patience and of generosity.

Your job is to give back what has been given to you. Offer up your gifts to the sun. What you worship you become. Become light. Transform those around you through the power of light and love, and laughter.

Have no expectations, have no preconceptions - they will only cause pain.

The new phase will be a relief. The way you live now is so much harder.

It will be like getting off the train and sitting in the meadow.

Relax, release, regenerate.

Our second meditation brought a truly venerable guest to me: Ananda Mayi Ma, whose picture graces my altar. She stood quietly until I asked a question about my yoga practice, which I put many hours into at this time of year over the past three years, but haven't this year. Is it enough, I asked? She replied:

The practice is enough. Nothing more is needed.

Sitting.

Being present.

Breathing,

Waiting patiently.

It is enough.

Practice is always, every moment of every day.

Remembering god, remembering the spark of god in everything, feeling god in you and seeing god around you.

It is in the eyes. Look into the eyes when you speak and the god in you will speak to the god in others.

Become god. We are all god.

OM.

OM.

OM.

Breathe in the present.

Breathe out the past to create the future.

In - out

In-out

Every breath creates past, present and future.

I am between the breaths.

I am you.

OM.

OM.

OM.

You may call me Mother.


As we sat waiting once more, I noticed my friends busy writing while I still stared at the fire. Then a figure rose from the flames, a fire woman, flaming clothing, flaming hair - fierce, frightening.

The fire cures the clay. You are clay. You are earth. If the earth burns, the clay will be hard enough to hold the water.

If the earth is to go on, we will be waiting.

We will hold you as the fire of transformation sears you.

Everything changes. Hold on to nothing

no thing

no idea

no plan

no hope

no earth

no sky.


I am the Queen of Fire.

Kali

Ereshkigal

Hellfire

leading to

purification

strength

dignity

power

wisdom

en LIGHT enment.

Called or uncalled, I am with you.

Thanks to Nico, Terry (wherever you are) and Arthur for posting this wonderful interview.

When asked in the late 1970's whether he believed an apocalypse was coming, Ganesh Baba responded that rather than a massive destructive shift, there would be millions of individual apocalypses, some in groups, but all ultimately individual. At the time, I found that comforting - and still do, but in a new way.

Last summer, I sat at my in-laws' dining room table listening to my husband talking to his mother about his lifelong passion for space exploration. He was a kid who dreamed of being an astronaut, who kept a scrapbook of every launch, and who saw NASA's work as the final frontier though much of his adult life.

"And now," Tom said to his mother, "the space shuttle project is finished, there are just a few probes flying out there - and only programs with military value are supported. The dream is over."

At that moment, something came together for me. The 2012 shift is a shift from humanity moving forward on the horizontal dimension, outward into the world, into space, into linear time; into a period of vertical growth. The frontier is inside now, in the timeless, spaceless dimension of depth, imagination, and meditation.

So the apocalypse is indeed individual; the Babylon of the outer world is falling before the glory of the inner light. And it is comforting - all the equipment we need to explore the new frontier is already built into our bodies.

We need to stop speculating, to stop fearing, to stop grasping, and to start some serious meditation practice.

One Sunday last summer Tom and I joined his parents for a service at their church. The nave of church, spare and white in classic Swedish Lutheran style, is undecorated except for a huge cross accented with eight glass blocks, one at the each end and four at its center.

As I listened to the pastor and looked at the cross, the language and stories he was telling took on a new meaning for me.

I'd been contemplating the vertical and horizontal dimensions for some time. In Ganesh Baba's Cycle of Synthesis, the horizontal line at the center represents time, moving from past to future, and the vertical is consciousness, shifting between spirit and matter.

Suddenly, I saw that the four glowing glass blocks at the center of the cross in front of represented the Christ: spirit manifest in time and space - "the son of God," Jesus, born into space/time of an earthly mother (mater/matter) and the heavenly father (spirit/consciousness). Phew. It was a pretty intense revelation for me, growing up in a non-religious Jewish home.

From this new perspective, everything the pastor was saying was about recognizing spirit in the material plane. It no longer mattered whether his, or anyone else's, interpretation was different; it was still, as Alice O. Howell would say, all about seeing the sacred in the commonplace.

And it still is.

Here's a version of the Cycle of Synthesis with Christ (as love represented by the heart chakra) at the center: