2016 the year that was

There’s an old saying that goes sort of like this “To wake you up God throws a pebble at your window, if you sleep through that He chucks a brick, if you ignore that He drops a boulder on your house.” You may die or you may wake up. Either way the old house is gone and you are contemplating uncharted terrain. Now you can rebuild the old house and retreat to the safety of the known or you can build a symbiotic relationship with the unknown. I think this is where we are all standing now…on the brink of change. For me 2016 has been the year of either burning bridges or burying our collective heads in the sand. We can keep pretending climate change is a fiscally-driven myth as Trump trumpets, we can keep pretending the tsunami tide of refugees is a disbanded group of terrorists seeking European infiltration, we can keep ignoring the rising sea of homeless who shadow our city streets, we can keep justifying corporate greed and the unwieldy balance of wealth and power and opportunity or we can let go of everything we’ve been taught to need, fear and aspire to. We can let go and tune into the universe we inhabit and see if maybe there is a higher way of being, a better paradigm for life and a braver metaphor for success than wealth and title. We can let go of being competitive and explore harmonious nurturing of others and the pooling of resources and opportunities. But we may have to let go of separation to do so. Separation by religion, politics, nation, gender, sexuality, age, wealth etc and recognize the common link of soul, breath and beauty. I asked a friend recently if his religion would be worth defending on another planet…he had been arguing volubly about the true nature of God – his God. He paused his learned rhetoric and considered the possibility that it might be a little pointless. He conceded that aliens may well have sprung from the same God but known by a different name. I asked him what he would have if he landed on a different planet. “My soul,” he said. “It’s all I will have left of my former life on earth. I wouldn’t even have my name because it would mean nothing without my family. No nationality, no wealth, no career, no history, no politics, no religion. Just my soul.” Just the freedom to be himself and nurture a symbiotic relationship with a nameless God – just as sweet, just as mysterious, just as potently available. It’s time to strip away the trappings of centuries of indoctrination and “name-calling” and reclaim the one truly universal identity we possess – our souls. We’ve forgotten to trust ourselves, our instincts, our truths, our opinions and our own version of God because life has been overly-mapped, overly-processed and overly-monitored for far too long. We are neither sheep nor shepherds but souls conjoined to a sky that drops manna if we have faith. We can do better than a divided word threatening each other with nuclear warheads and fiscal sanctions. We can do better than arguing over God instead of emulating Him or Her or IT. We can do better than leaving people lonely at Christmas or indeed any other day of the year. We can do better with no cost to ourselves because the equity of the soul, the only transferable currency we possess, is love and every deposit increases our balance on this or any other planet, in this or any other race, with or without gravity , winged or rooted in the earth, it’s all one ultimately. The point of consciousness, the soul holds the entire universe in suspension and distance is an illusion. From here we journey forth, to here we return only to realize no distance was covered, no separation was possible and all the arguments, wars and loyalties were human constructs created by the faithless to cure their fear of separation and death.