Autumn has presented itself to us in quite a gentle manner this year, a gradual changing of the colours giving way to a beautiful vision, blending the full spectrum from, green to yellow, orange and then red; the metaphorical rainbow peace offering.
This moment is very much the time to feast our eyes on Mother Nature as she displays her final bow, the leaves turning and falling, before retreating to the winter months of hibernation. She is teaching us that while all things must die, this can also be beautiful. Here we see life held in balance, the days and nights are equal in length as we arrive at the Autumn Equinox and for the first time we can see ourselves mirrored in the Spring Equinox at the very start of our journey.
The astrology mirrors this whole heartedly, as does this story when looked at in relation to the journey of the lifetime experience.
For the first time, after all the self-absorption that comes with childhood we are now reaching adulthood. This maturity allows us to step into our hearts, look at the ‘other’, the ‘lover’, and see that we all grow when we recognise that life is about experiencing ourselves through the reflection of all that we bring into our lives. We are deeply connected to all of nature; the good, what we think might be the bad, and even what we might want to call the ugly. When we recognise that it is all perfect we might let go of these judgements?
The libra archetype shows us the scales of justice, of fairness. Here we are invited to recognise the beautiful idea, that everyone benefits when we see life from a broader perspective. This takes imagination and a creative mind, this takes an ability to dream and then manifest it.
The outrageous beauty that Mother Nature gifts us, for our eyes to feast on, reminds us that we too have natural way of being, this power, that we are creative beyond our wildest dreams. We just need to set this desire in our hearts and let the winds of change bring in all the things we wish to surround ourselves with.
What would you choose? What is amazing is that most of us would choose almost the same things; a life filled with love, a roof over our heads and food in our belly.
If these are things we all want why do we find them so impossible to manifest into our world.
I sense that we are so out of balance that we believe our current state of lack is normal, just as we are taught there is not enough for everyone. Even when we might have plenty we sense into the emptiness we feel as a collective, the pain of separation from Mother Earth, and ourselves. We feel that change is more terrifying than having the world we most yearn for, as we lack the imagination or experience to imagine the love and feeling of reconnection available to us all. Why else would we not choose that everyone had the basic gifts of life we all deserve and believe that this choice is somehow someone else's problem to solve.
It is my belief that all these things are actually not that difficult to achieve if we all choose them collectively. If we look around we can see many individuals and collectives are already moving in this direction, it simply doesn’t get enough airplay; the good news rarely does.
We can create anything we would like to have in our lives, we just have to remove the blocks that tell us we don’t deserve them or that they're unrealistic; conditioning which has curbed our ability to manifest a fair world. This is the big issue, as these blocks are hidden deep within our ancestral history and the pain they have created has been pushed down so far we are not even aware of its existence. This is what we are up against, we live with the reaction without understanding where it has come from.
At this stage of our journey, as we arrive at our heart chakra, the half way point, we sense our life is held in balance. We are invited to be open, vulnerable and kind; kind to ourselves and those around us. We have not only lost this way of being but judge, especially the vulnerable part, not to be good. We would do well to look deeper for when we truly step into the heart it brings us the wisdom and the ability to listen to our bodies that hold all the ancient truths without the judgement of the mind. Here is where we all connect.
Rather than taking this simple step, we have chosen to ignore our inner truth and instead concentrate on listening to each other in all our pain. We have built stories that separate us from each other and create hatred that enables us to do terrible things to each other and ourselves. We just have to look around to see this happening in our society.
It is my desire to shift our reactions back to felt responses, to create a vision of a world based on compassion and truly listening and understanding each other.
When people hold a different opinion to my beliefs, rather than step into being right or different, I want to step into their shoes and truly see through their eyes, see the similarities not the differences, have empathy and realise we actually all want the same things. Once we stop putting up our defence mechanisms and our protective armoury we can find that conflict is a gift to seeing our way to a better way of working together, where everyone feels heard and can bring their truth to the table whether their views are dissenting or consenting.
Dissenters have always been conveniently removed from society as inappropriate and it is time we re-evaluated what this has done to the beautiful idea of our world. Without dissenters we will never grow out of this painful place we find ourselves in, where we vigilantly uphold our right to be right, even though all we continue to create and see in our society is inequality and injustices. Surely this needs rethinking?
Beneath the anger and pain there is only love, let’s drop the need to be right and listen to each other and our hearts so that we can begin to find common ground and common good.
Photo: Mark Brookes taken at the Jewish Museum Berlin
