A CALL TO ARMS

A CALL TO ARMS

Monday, September 17, 2012
 

My mind is so filled up with thoughts I cannot release them quickly enough.  My heart is so full of feelings they are backing up and flooding the terrain of my inner landscape.  “Write!”, that whispered directive comes again.  And again.  And again.  But when I sit down, the thoughts and feelings tangle up so that I don’t know what to release onto the paper… 
 

I hear the blowing of the shofar, calling us to arms.  The split between the polarities in our world is widening, the dark is becoming deep and murky; the light is radiant and intense.  Those who are awake, alert, and aware look unflinchingly at the destruction and suffering we have collectively created—whether by intention, complicity, compliance, passivity or ignorance.  Helpless, angry, we wonder why those to whom we gave the power to resolve these problems are failing us.  We read.  We talk and rail.  Some sign petitions.  Some march.  Some strike.  Some do political work.  Some advocate for causes—there are hundreds of causes.  It all seems a drop in the bucket. 
 

We are invited to fine-tune our listening, for we may hear a call to arms of a different kind: weapons of love, forgiveness, compassion, gratitude, joy, courage, kindness.  The real battles we fight are in the mind fields where thoughts are the bullets and the bombs; better thoughts of love and healing, than hatred and destruction!  With this new way of warring, sieges of our cities are done with random acts of kindness and with the proliferation of projects that heal our Earth and one another.  We end this war by raising the energy vibrations of ourselves and one another and the very Earth and restoring balance in the energy fields of Earth, of Sea and Air and all who dwell within them. 
 

Re-creating a world where all may thrive will only happen if each of us is first willing to call a cease-fire within ourselves.  It takes just as much commitment and work and courage and perseverance to “fight” from within the Light as it does for those on either side of the line battling with the same weapons with the goal of destroying the “other”, or at least the work of the other.  The two have very different outcomes, however.  Battling against ego with ego, fighting hatred with hatred, raging against what we name “evil” from our fear; nothing changes no matter which side has their King on the Hill and their day of Occupation and Victory.  But entering the battle with weapons of love, like the Sun burning off the fog, the Light begins to replace the Darkness.

I like the idea that time isn't linear because it has taken me years to fully wake up, and more years to fully grasp the concepts of what it means to let go of Ego, to love my enemies, to root up old, toxic beliefs that tainted the Love that flowed through me.  It is taking me even more years beyond those to lay down new habits of thought and belief and action that are grounded in gratitude and joy, compassion and forgiveness.  But gradually this noisy gong and clanging cymbal has quieted and is now willing to not only enter the river, but to become the river—the River of Life, which is Love, which is Light.