Becoming the Bearer of Water: Meandering Downriver with the Head of Orpheus
The Mars in Aquarius Conjunct Pluto in Aquarius Edition
Last week’s picaresque riff began with me in bed on Moku o Keawe, the Big Island, tucked into a mountainside looking down on the Pu’uhonua o Hōnaunau, an ancient Hawaiian Place of Refuge. This week’s begins with a memory of me in bed on a different island, Manisses—Block Island—where I lived for many years just above sea-level, often enshrouded in mist, so close to the labradorite ocean my mind became iridescent, my body part of its tidal flow.
One night the ocean surged up the beach, funneled through the dune path and flooded the field in front of my house. You’d think I would have woken up as the water seeped under the lintel of my front door, but I slept on; the water continued to rise, filling the small ground floor bedroom and lifting my twin bed up two flights of stairs, taking me and the house with it in a great gulp, like the whale swallowed Jonah when he ran away from Yahweh, known as God if you grew up a Christian. Funny to think of him with a name like Josh or Joe, isn’t it? But once upon a time God was not absolute. He was one of many stories people told themselves to explain the world. God was not always abstract, despite his moniker. In fact, in the Hebrew Old Testament he’s quite specific in his wants and desires. And one of those desires that turned into a demand, was that Jonah, a renowned prophet, go to the wicked city of Nineveh and prophesy its destruction unless the citizens cleaned up their act, whence God would forgive them.
Jonah ran away. Why? Apparently he hated the Ninevehite’s so much he didn’t want them to be forgiven!
Seems perverse, but I bet if you think about it, you can think of circumstances in your own life you’ve done the same, or at least thought about. I know I have.
Yahweh sent a great storm to punish Jonah, who was tossed overboard by the sailors to appease him. Into the belly of the whale he went, where for three days he prayed to Yahweh to forgive him and promised to obey if Yahweh saved him. Yahweh commanded the whale to spit Jonah out. He kept his word and high-tailed it to Nineveh, preached to the people the destruction Yahweh had in store for them, and the people repented. Yahweh was merciful. Today, Nineveh is the city Mosul in Iraq, destroyed by ISIS who made it their headquarters. It was “liberated” by U.S. forces in 2017.
While of course I don’t support terrorists, religious fundamentalism and dictators, I seek liberation beyond the cycle of violence imprinted deep in the Earth’s bedrock by millennia of blood sacrifice, hence the ironic quotation marks. What if Yahweh had just let Jonah go? Would we still be caught in this endless war where the ends always justify the means? Everyone who died in Mosul, everyone who has died in every war, was someone’s child, someone’s husband, brother, wife, daughter, son, friend—someone who was loved.
Back in my flood, I awoke, buoyant, floating on the calm blue. The island was gone. Down below, a peaked roof. No fear. Curiosity. Looking around, I noticed others floating with me. Nobody close enough to recognize, but I was glad to see them, not because I felt alone or needed comfort, it was just nice to be sharing this buoyancy, watching fish swim in and out of the windows of the houses that once held our whole worlds.
Then I fell back asleep, which most of us in this current consensual reality call waking up, and the fear entered.
The sheets of my twin bed were dry, the bed still up against the wall. I aroused myself, threw off the covers and walked upstairs to the kitchen. The walls were not dripping with water. The grassy field was there, the path to the dunes, and the ocean was in its proper place, lapping on the shore. But the pebbles on the beach were rumbling. That was the only sign I had that my dream might come true.
This was over 20 years ago. We had just survived Y2K without data collapse and the power blacking out. Apocalypse was not yet in the air, even in pop culture. Well, there was REM’s “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine), but that parenthetical statement gives you a good idea of the general tone of the time. Existential doom and worrying about the apocalypse was not in. Irony was. I was used to being an outlier, but all of a sudden, I felt very alone.
I shared my dream with a healer. “Do you think my dream was a vision of apocalypse?”
“Perhaps,” she answered. There was no fear in her voice. “But it could also happen internally.”
But we are going to have to go through it either way, is what she didn’t say—but I heard it.
And so it began, my internal unveiling, which is the original meaning of the word.
Apocalypse: from the Greek: apokalyptein "uncover, disclose, reveal." The word consists of two parts: apo “off, away from" + kalyptein "to cover, conceal.”
I started to prophesy. People thought I was crazy and were disturbed. I don’t blame them. My pronouncements published in the early days of blogging about the end of the world were mixed up with the anguish of my personal healing journey. Of course they were worried. I wasn’t surprised when my Uncle Herman, who also lived on the island, showed up at my door to make sure I was still alive. My parents had asked him to go check on me.
I was weeding the garden, perfectly fine and functioning on a sunny spring day. When Uncle Herman pulled in the driveway my nose was in a spray of daffodils. I knew right away he wasn’t stopping by to chat. He was quite a character and known for his wit and good-natured teasing. As an intense, Scorpionic, sometimes lacking in humor young woman, we chafed at times, or I chafed at him. I don’t think he was too worried what I thought about him. He was too busy having fun being himself, something it was going to take me many more yours of anguish to figure out was the best course in life. Anyway, let’s just say I wasn’t good at laughing at myself. The novelty of his genuine concern made me realize I needed to be more careful with my words. (Side thought, because that’s the way I think, had my uncle’s concern been there all along and I was just too biased to see it? And if you have a hard time keeping up with my digressions, let me just say there are so many dimensions within the parenthetical, so many voices and ways of seeing the world, so why not stray from the linear narrative if it’s going to ultimately expand the vision, which means opening the heart, which in this case is what happened that afternoon between me and Uncle Herman.) I reassured him I was ok. We may have even hugged, or “pugged” as my brother and I called it, a pat on the back/hug combo favored by New England WASPS that, doled out so preciously only in truly dire circumstances, actually expressed more than a bear hug.
Reassured I wasn’t dead, Uncle Herman jumped back into his Volkswagen Thing and rumbled off like the pebbles on the beach, though the sound was jolly not ominous. I went back in the house, both chastened and cheered. I felt bad I upset people so much, and cheered that Uncle Herman came over to check on me. I resolved to be quieter. Maybe I didn’t need to express my every thought and mood in public. Maybe nobody needed to hear my prophesies of doom. Anything I said wouldn't change anything anyway. There were far greater forces than little old me in the world. I chose to go underground for awhile and survived my own cataclysm, a few in fact.
Cataclysm: "a deluge, a flood," originally especially "Noah's flood," from French cataclysme (16c.), from Latin cataclysmos or directly from Greek kataklysmos "deluge, flood, inundation," from PIE *kleue- "to wash, clean.”
I decided I didn’t want to be a Cassandra, cursed to have no one believe my prophecies. I focused on the internal apocalypse and let the outside world take care of itself, maybe not such a noble path, definitely a privileged one, but it kept me sane and I’m still here writing to you after surviving more than one inner catastrophe, which is another kind of prophecy, right?
Catastrophe: "reversal of what is expected" (especially a fatal turning point in a drama, the winding up of the plot), from Latin catastropha, from Greek katastrophē "an overturning; a sudden end," from katastrephein "to overturn, turn down, trample on; to come to an end."
As the path to the external catastrophe ramps up in the form of climate change, the global war machine grinds on, and AI, at the hands of tech bro programmers, threatens to delete the organic human, perhaps we all need to wind up the plot internally, embrace the sudden end, even if we fear it. Look to the word itself.
Catastrophe: a reversal of what is expected. The truth is, A does not always lead to B, or even all the way to Z. There are languages we don’t yet speak that haven’t even been broken down into phonemes, let alone transcribed as letters. They are sounds, and if we let them become songs, who knows where they will carry us?
Part Two
According to the ancient Greeks, to prophesy was to be able to interpret the will of the gods. In our time, we think of prophecies as predictions of the future. The predictions of the 16th century prophet Nostradamus are well known examples, and whether you believe that many of his vague quatrains have come true or not, they have been interpreted by many as truth in a very literal way, leaving little room for the will of the gods who were courted through elaborate rituals by the sybils in Ancient Greece. Remember, originally, a prophecy predicted a potential future. If we pleased the gods, this would happen. If we didn’t, this would be the result. In the beginning, at least as far back as we know in Western Civilization, a prophecy was aware the future was not fixed, it depended on choices. In the beginning, a prophecy was quantum, not linear. Our collective inability to perceive the quantum resulting from centuries of putting our blind faith in the linear has caused us to outsource our own knowing, resulting in a lack of discernment that causes many to believe anyone who presents their visions with the conviction of absolute conviction, unable to see that many of these Instagram and Tik Tok prophets are gaslighting narcissistic sociopaths.
What I’m trying to say, is in Gregorian calendar time, the hour is late, but our choices matter, even the small ones. Those choices are what will lead us beyond days blocked off in squares, cut off from the sun and moon that keep us as prisoners of the machines who prophecy we will die if we don’t obey their will.
What is the will of the gods? In Western Civilization, we’ve been told the gods are outside us. Gradually, this concept narrowed until the gods became God. Like I said, Yahweh, the Hebrew god, became God. Taking away his individual name separated him from other gods like Zeus or Mars. This abstraction led to the narrowing of Christianity, too, that has reached an end point in the fundamentalist version we see trying to overtake the U.S. government. We were told we were created in his image, but unless you are a white man that’s not relevant. Why, then, do so many choose to follow this God, an abstraction that negates the lived experience of anyone but white men? The fear of punishment runs deep. Can you blame us? Nobody wants to piss off God, get thrown overboard and end up in the belly of a whale.
Subservience is the program we run on, but it’s not in our blood, despite the best attempts of numerous industries to poison us. We still have bone memory, access to the primal knowing that we are all part of the romance of nature and all the stories it tells, despite the best attempts of the fundamentalists of all religions to convince us there is only one way this whole human event is going to go down. Fundamentalism, without irony, is intent on ending this world as a tragedy, but remember—it’s the comedies that have happy endings, usually a wedding where the union of two becoming one creates a third reality, one that can’t be seen through the sights of a gun, or the end of a sword tip. Instead of Hamlet dead on the stone floor of Elsinore, let’s model our future on the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where in a triple wedding, Lysander weds Hermia, Demetrius weds Helena, Theseus, Duke of Athens weds the Amazon Hipollyta, and Puck and the fairies return to the palace to bless all those who dwell within.
But this world is tragic! I hear you exclaim. Comedies are unrealistic. Politicians are real, not fairies. And what’s up with that guy Bottom with a donkey head? You’re telling us we should follow that?
Yes, I am. You don’t have to believe in fairies to understand that nature is romance, and that a comedy is not just funny, it’s a representation of the astonishing creativity and proliferation of nature that goes on even when it looks like there’s no hope. There was conflict in all realms, human and fairy, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Titania and Oberon, the Fairy King and Queen were at odds, too, but the play ends with multiple unions that stray across species. Titania, the Fairy Queen, falls in love with and sleeps with Bottom when his head is a donkey’s. Released from Puck’s spell, he returns back to human form and returns to his old friends a changed man. The formerly cocky Bottom is humbled by his encounter with something beyond his rational mind.
“I have had a dream—past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had.
—WilliamShakespeare, A Midsummer Nights’ Dream, Act IV, Scene 1
Next time you think we’re doomed to kill ourselves and all end up dead choking on blood on the cold stone floor of Elsinore, think of Chernobyl, the Ukrainian city that was the site of a nuclear power plant meltdown in 1986. Yes, thousands of lives have been blighted by this event—the rates of cancer amongst survivors are high and I’m sure the effects of post-traumatic stress on survivors and their descendants has been devastating, but that is only one strand of this abandoned city’s story. On another thread, trees have grown through the windows, cracked the sidewalks.
“Our research with Belarussian colleagues has found mammal populations in the reserve similar to other nature reserves in the region,” says James Smith from the School of Environmental, Geographical and Geological Sciences, University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom. “Wolf numbers are seven times higher, likely due to much lower hunting pressure in the CEZ.”
Smith, together with Nick Beresford from the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, has conducted extensive research on wildlife in the area.
“Our camera trap surveys in Ukraine have photographed Eurasian lynx, brown bear, black storks and European bison. Ukrainian and Belarussian researchers have recorded hundreds of plant and animal species in the zone, including more than 60 [rare] species,” says Beresford.
Who is the main character of the story of Earth? Could there be more than one? What if it’s not true that God, aka Yahweh, gave us dominion over all the other creatures? What if those creatures have dominion over us? Or what if they are our equals and they’re just patiently waiting for us to wake up and stop struggling against the fact we’ll one day be compost for the forest? These are the questions we must ask ourselves.
Part Three
What if the god aren’t outside us? I’m not saying we are the gods—yet—though I’m not denying it either. What I’m saying is that maybe what we are calling the will of the gods is simply nature. Is not a hurricane a god? What is a god anyway? A force greater than the human that grants us life and can take it away just as easily? If that’s the definition, then hurricanes, several which I’ve lived through, are definitely gods.
In my mind, the confusion starts when we made the gods into God. Nothing in our lived experience on Earth backs up the assertion that God is singular. Just the switch from the gods to God immediately separates us from the plurality of nature, trapping us in a juvenile delusion that keeps us both subservient and causes us to feel superior. We believe we need God to redeem us and approve of our lives while perceiving ourselves as above the fray of nature where creatures are ruled by instinct, unable to reason themselves into abstraction. Capitalizing the word makes it a name, turning into a proper noun whose function is to assert identity
But are we not nature? The fact that I ask that question with a not instead of saying we are, says so much about our collective amnesia. I have recovered somewhat, enough to understand how much I’ve forgotten. Enough to mourn for all we’ve lost and long for a way of being my bones still remember. Enough for my mind to become a tool of recovery, a builder of bridges, a weaver of webs, even a singer sometimes. We have been separated by our words and the way we use them, but they can be reanimated. In the beginning words were nature. Bird calls, howls, and grunts in the long grass. In the beginning our words were songs.
I live on Moku o Keawe, one of the Hawaiian Islands, where Kū season just began. There are many gods in the Hawaiian pantheon, but, until recently, the four principle gods—Lono, Ku, Kane, and Kanaloa, have never much interested me. I thought they were kind of impersonal and boring. I preferred the gods that had more human characteristics like Pele and Hi’iaka, Kamapua’a and Kamohoali’i. These gods went on quests, fell in love, took revenge, fell into despair, and expressed triumph, just like us humans. But when I started to engage with Lono and Kū as seasons, roughly winter and summer since we don’t have all four here in the tropics, I developed a relationship with these deities that has made them quite interesting.
Kū, Kane, Lono, and Kanaloa are known as akua in ‘Olelo Hawai’i. They don’t have human characteristics because they are forces of nature. Connecting with the akua happens when a person connects with the cycles of nature. I repeat, we are nature. Having said that, I’m still not saying we are the gods. I am saying we are a part of them. The relationship is interdependent, which is a truer reflection of the way life actually functions on planet Earth. Science demonstrates that absolutely everything is connected and affecting everything else. The famous Butterfly Effect of quantum physics being a beautiful and poetic example.
I want to pivot towards Internal Family Systems, a contemporary form of therapy that according to Psychology Today:
is an approach to psychology that identifies and addresses multiple sub-personalities or families within each person’s mental system. These sub-personalities consist of wounded parts and painful emotions such as anger and shame, and parts that try to control and protect the person from the pain of the wounded parts. The sub-personalities are often in conflict with each other and with one’s core Self, a concept that describes the confident, compassionate, whole person that is at the core of every individual. IFS focuses on healing the wounded parts and restoring mental balance and harmony by changing the dynamics that create discord among the sub-personalities and the Self.
In IFS, a person is told that all parts are welcome. A client is guided to dialogue between these parts and with the core Self, who acts as a guiding light to resolve the conflicts and integrate the disturbing behaviors resulting from the inner conflicts through creative visualization. This is contemporary shamanic work in an easily digestible format, if you’re comfortable with therapy, at least. I may prefer the romance of the sweat lodge, an ayahuasca ceremony, or a soul retrieval with a shaman banging a drum above me, but the fact is soul will find a way to find us because it’s the the deepest layer of our existence, the web of fascia beneath the straining muscles and brittle bones. As a bodyworker, I feel over and over again, how softening the fascia changes the whole body’s structure. It doesn’t need to be broken up. (You can’t imagine how often clients ask me to “beat them up.”) It mostly just needs to be witnessed, to feel listened to, to feel safe. When this happens my hands sink into the subtle pull of gravity and the whole web of life relaxes. In summary, don’t think you need to go outside yourself. Enjoy the beauty and the dramas of the ceremonies and vision quests if you feel called, but don’t discount, or feel less than, if your transformation comes on the therapist’s couch (or a Zoom call). Your soul, and the world’s soul, has always been available to you, and always will be. It’s available right now. All parts are welcome.
A word of caution—don’t over-analyze the gods. Leave a lot of room for mystery. What’s so important about figuring everything out? However, consider viewing yourself as a part of an akua, as an element in their internal evolution leading to the evolution of Earth itself and the Cosmos.
We are fortunate the genocide of the Hawaiians, and many other indigenous people who have maintained their cultures, was not complete. Even in the midst of ongoing colonization and genocide, they still offer us living examples of what a culture can look like who places Earth’s needs beyond the individual’s. Despite persecution and genocide, the knowledge of what it means to be a real human has not been forgotten by all humans. I bow to those people who still know how to read the wind and waves, and thank them. They have kept the possibility of a different future for humanity alive against incredible odds. It is up to us all not to waste their suffering and sacrifice. How will we evolve humanity to incorporate what indigenous cultures have maintained with the developments of technology that are calling us into the future? And what does the figure of the prophet have to do with this?
Part Four
The signs are all around us: dying reefs, wildfires, drowning islands. These are prophecies of what may come if we continue to believe that forgiveness for our sins lies outside of us. We don’t need to be forgiven. We do need to atone, though not for our sins, just for the harmful actions we took while in amnesia. And atonement does not mean we have to suffer. It’s as simple as remembering and making the corrections to realign with nature. Remember, cultures are made of individuals. Do you want to live in a culture generated by whoever programs AI, at this point a coterie of mostly white males clustered in Silicon Valley who appear to be severely deficient in empathy, or one created by organic humans across the gender spectrum who are not subordinate to technology, but cooperate with it?
Organic humans—I also like the term I used above—real humans—have been on my mind lately since reading the astonishing book, Solar Storms, by Linda Hogan. Hogan, of Chickasaw descent, is one of the best American writers of our time. She demonstrates just what I mentioned in the last paragraph, adapting an indigenous consciousness to a new technology—the novel—an art form that developed out of the European Renaissance that made its way to North America with the immigrants who tried to destroy the hundreds of cultures already inhabiting the land.
Solar Storms is an example of resilience. Published in 1995, it’s also a prophecy about resilience. The characters in the book don’t stop the bulldozers that distort the path of the river they try to save, but they survive.
“Tears have a purpose. They are what we carry of ocean, and perhaps we must become sea, give ourselves to it, if we are to be transformed.”
—Linda Hogan, Solar Storms
I cried through the last twenty pages of the book, anointing the pages. (It’s hard to grasp how much generosity/ Is involved in letting us go on breathing, /When we contribute nothing valuable but our grief, wrote Robert Bly). The generosity is astonishing, and our grief is valuable. Every time we cry a dried up artery re-opens, and a tributary remembers it has the potential to refresh an entire river system.
I couldn’t help thinking of all the people who stood up for the water at Standing Rock to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline, which would have put their water supply at risk and violated the will of the land to shape itself according to its own terms. Remember their slogan? Water is Life.
The Mū doctrines say the Mea Ne’e were beings that came to Earth to prepare this planet for life. Guess what form they took?
Water.
Water is from the stars. Water is alive. Water is sacred. Refresh yourself with that knowledge.
Prophecies are around us all the time. All parts are welcome. But some parts, some stories, expand the vision, while some close it down. We need to listen to the expansive stories now. If we are to complete the human even, we must all become visionaries. We don’t need Jonah anymore. We need to become the whale, not the sacrifice.
In retrospect, I can see reading Solar Storms was a prophecy of this essay. It also brought me into the past by making me remember the dream I recounted earlier. The will of the gods goes both ways, it seems. Remember, how we experience time is a choice.
Take the eagle’s view sometimes. Look down at the round Earth and fly beyond the human eye’s range. Fly into the sun where the phoenix nests, brooding on a nest of flames. We must allow ourselves to be incinerated. Seen from so high, death can be honored as the ritual it was meant to be, the one that frees us from the linear and releases us back into the circle’s grace.
Will the circle be unbroken, by and by, Lord, by and by. Theres’ a better home awaiting, in the sky Lord, in the Sky.
I love that song, but I don’t see why the world in the sky has to be better than this one.
Part Five
Right now it’s whale season in Hawai’i. When I dive under the water I can hear their songs traveling through the water for thousands of miles. What do their songs mean? Can they be translated or are they pure frequency, beyond words? Why do we care what something means anyway? Aside from their beauty, what is so important about the songs in the water?
Yesterday, a new strand on this web that’s been weaving me began to gleam. I heard the note of a plucked string—the lyre of Orpheus—and he told me some things I’m going to share now that may point a way to this new vision I feel calling us to call it in, though perhaps I should release the singular and use the non-binary pronoun “them.” I like what Ke’oni Hanalei says, “There is more than enough room in this universe for all our beliefs.” My preferences are not the truth. In fact, they can be limiting. Arteries calcify from isolation as well as eating too much red meat. The river accepts anything that falls into it and carries it to the ocean without asking if it’s going to be good for the water.
In Greek mythology, Orpheus was known as the greatest musician who ever lived. His father was Apollo, his mother, the Muse Calliope. His instrument was a lyre made by the trickster Hermes from the shell of a tortoise. It was said his music was so enchanting it could move inanimate things like stones. He was on the ship with Jason and the Argonauts on the quest to get the Golden Fleece, and was the reason they made it past the sirens, who were so mesmerized by his music they let them pass instead of devouring them.
His beloved was name Eurydice. From the Greek: eur dike, eurus-a vastness of space or power, dike-to show. The One Who Judges with Breadth. Eurydice saw things from the eagle’s vantage. She took the wide view. We all need to see like Eurydice right now.
One day, walking in a field, she was set upon by a satyr. In her struggle to escape the assault, she was bitten by a snake in the long grass and died. They say when Orpheus discovered her body, the grief that poured through his lyre was so immense the gods wept. In pity, they advised him to seek her in the Underworld.
Orpheus took the gods’ advice and journeyed town to beg Hades and Persephone to restore his beloved. The King and Queen of the Underworld were so moved by his music they agree to let her return to the world above—on one condition—Eurydice must walk behind him, and he must not, in any circumstances, look back at her.
Orpheus looks back. Eurydice sinks back into the Underworld, this time forever.
Why does he look back? Why couldn’t he have just held on a little longer and lived happily ever after like a Disney Princess?
But, if you’re familiar with fairy tales, you’ll know the Disney versions aren’t how most fairy tales end. Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid is so far from both Disney versions, animated and live-action, it’s almost comical. In the original, the nameless mermaid is given a knife by the sea witch and instructed to kill the prince’s new bride. She is invited to transgress. She chooses not to, does not get the prince like Ariel does in Disney, and is turned into seafoam, only to be given a soul by God because her sacrifice was so noble. I’m not saying I would not have been horrified if the nameless mermaid had knifed her rival while sleeping, but I do want to point out that transgressions are often exactly what lead to the fulfillment of the hero or heroine’s quest. Perhaps anything written by Andersen, with its Christian overlay isn’t the best example, but my mind was on Disney princesses and those happily ever afters we all want. A much older story like The Lindworm, in which the barren Queen, in search of a magical way to conceive, devours the red flower, not the white as she’s instructed, resulting in the desired child and its wild twin. Thrown into the forest by the midwife at birth, the wild twin becomes a monster who makes his way back to the castle to claim his birthright. Listening to the story of how his crafty young wife scours him with lye and soothes his raw skin with milk until his true innocence is exposed creates neural pathways back to our wildness, something we’d all do well to remember.
In The Lindworm, the young woman isn’t forced to marry the monster. She chooses to. The hero is a leader, not a follower.
Now we don’t all live in fairy tales, but I’m telling you. There are times when if someone says don’t follow the wolves’ path, follow the horses’, consider following the wolves. This is not just how a hero or heroine comes into their own, it’s how we become sovereign humans. Sacred transgression is part of learning to think for yourself. Only then, can you truly make an authentic contribution to your community. By that I mean one that comes from your soul.
Why does Orpheus look back? Why doesn’t he complete his destiny?
Back in the day Orpheus worshipped Dionysus and Apollo, but they say as he got older, he spurned the god of wine and revelry, and only worshipped Apollo, the god of light. He met his end at the hands of the Maenads, ecstatic devotees of Dionysus, who tore him to pieces as punishment for neglecting their god. The Maenads threw his body in the river. They say his head kept singing as the river carried it to the sea, finally coming to rest on the island of Lesbos, where the inhabitants buried it and it became a shrine where his oracle was consulted. Zeus sent an eagle down to pluck his lyre out of the river and placed it in the stars, where it became the constellation Lyra.
Recently, I participated in an online think-tank hosted by Ke’oni Hanalei about the constellation Lyra, who I mentioned earlier. (If you want to join in an online three-part event on the subject here’s a link: The Series of Ages: The Calendar of Lyra.
Without diving too deep into the esoteric, one of the things we discussed was the need for calendar reform on Earth, and how the constellation Lyra, set in the sky by the eagle of Zeus, may be a part of that.
Our current method of measuring time in the West, the Gregorian Calendar has always been an agent of empire. It was devised by the Romans as means to organize the collection of taxes, and has little relationship to the akua—the natural cycles of time that rise out of the Earth in its relationship to moon and stars. It’s put a chokehold on our collective vision, chaining us to clocks that measure the time in seconds only because we said so. Think about it—a second is not a natural form of time? What is?
A heartbeat.
In order to reanimate our relationship with time we need a new calendar.
There is music in the water. Can you hear it? I know you can’t all dive down a few feet and hear the whales singing like I can, but I suspect some of you are hearing the songs. What would a calendar look like that was attuned to rhythms that moved through water to the stars?
I don’t think whale songs are laments for the past, even though sometimes they sound mournful, but they may be prophecies of a potential future. But that future is determined by now, which is always changing, which means there are infinite potential futures. We decide the future.
When Orpheus looked back at Eurydice, he didn’t complete his mission. Eventually, he was torn apart by the Maenads and his body-less song traveled through the river. This song is about now. We get to embody it, give Orpheus back the limbs to move, the beating heart to love. We, guided by his lyre in the stars, get to complete the journey up from the Underworld as a collective. We get to become real humans, every single one of us. No one gets left behind.
I’m not saying cataclysm and catastrophe are upon us. The invitation is not urgent, but it is unavoidable. Like Orpheus, we must all make the descent into the Underworld, like the creatures on Noah’s ark, but this time we get to be polyamorous and with more genders. Remember, that triple wedding blessed by the fairies at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. When we ascend from the Underworld—together, though that may look like a long, straggling line of solitary figures blinking at the light, we can choose the new social and economic structures that are the inevitable result of the intended human legacy—LOVE.
Part Six
Not many of us are raised these days to think of human’s presence on Earth as an event. If anything, we disparage ourselves and think we’re a blight on the planet, a “cancer” we call ourselves.
Not true, We are a gift, and like all gifts, we must be opened to be fully received.
What will it mean for humans when we receive the gifts of Orpheus beaming back to us from the constellation Lyra?
One thing I think will happen is we’ll be able to move the inanimate—our songs will levitate rocks and stones. Could this be a return to ancient technologies? Some say Atlantis was powered by technologies fueled by frequency rather than fossil fuels, and the society was destroyed by the cataclysms of flood and fire because that technology was abused. Even if you don’t believe in Atlantis, you can’t deny the evolution of technology in even just the past 30 years. It’s astonishing how far we’ve come. Even more astonishing when you go back a hundred years. My Uncle Herman, an aviator himself, used to remark we journeyed from The Wright Brothers catching air at Kitty Hawk, to putting a man on the Moon in less than a hundred years. The leap from bi-plane to space ship seems primitive in comparision to the leaps in technology we’re going through now. Yet most of us are not in awe.
Why is that?
Why are we not in awe we can carry a web that spans the entire globe in our pockets?
We are numb, Argonauts soldiering on to get that Golden Fleece, which was so desired by Jason because it was a symbol of kingship.
A King is not made by a symbol. I King is a symbol, and that symbol has nothing to do with hereditary power. A King is a man who has authority within himself, and he dwells inside female bodies, too. And where does that authority come from? Completions. A King goes through the required initiations when they present themselves. He responds, not reacts.
In our time, without tribal structures to initiate us, we have to do it ourselves, which has resulted in a lot of awkward New Age ceremonies and outrageous cultural appropriations, that, while well-intentioned have kept us relying on an agent outside ourselves, that same old capital “G” God who is not so well-intentioned, whose intent is to keep us separate from the parts of us that remember we are part of the akua, the akua part of us, a God who will keep punishing us until we stop punishing ourselves by denying the truth our bones have never lost—we were made of the Earth, for the Earth, and before that we were stars. Not to lay all the blame on God. He’s just been playing his part, waiting for us to wake up and realize we don’t need him anymore. Life will initiate us. But we need to complete the stages of the journey life offers. Too many of us are swallowed by the whale and stay inside that dark cavern for our entire lives.
And now the stars are calling us. The lyre of Orpheus, retrieved from the water by the eagle of Zeus and set in the stars, is plucking our strings. The songs are ringing from the water’s very source. Maybe not all of us can consciously hear them, but they’re affecting us all nevertheless. Look around and see who else is in the water with you. Who else is buoyant enough to be lifted on the rising tide? Who has crowned themselves, and who needs some help on the way back up to the surface from the Underworld?
Don’t be afraid of the dark. You were made there and it’s where you’ll return. Don’t be afraid of the light when it blinds you on the way back up. Just shield your eyes and keep walking. Eventually your eyes will adjust, and maybe if you’re lucky, Hermes will toss you a pair of shades so you look really hip when you take your first steps in the new world you’ve earned by responding to the present moment. You didn’t get lost in the past and now you’ve got Eurydice, at your side, sharing with you her wide vision and impressed by your style.
We are not alone. Every event in our lives is here to help us. Our individual trials lead to our legacy, and the more of us who face the Underworld demons and make the ascent without looking back, the more the momentum builds that will contribute to a collective completion that will hopefully result in the succesful transmission of Love, which according to the Mū doctrines is the intended legacy of the human event, into the next world, the same way the octopus transmitted the last world’s experiment, electricity, into this one.
“I sing the body electric,” wrote Walt Whitman. “And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?”
What is the soul? I don’t know, without the body, it’s just a concept to me. I’m not one of those people who can talk to spirits or see auras, but I can feel it. My eyes may be limited to the physical, but I know when the soul shows up. It’s the knife in the heart when the flamenco dancer snaps her black-heeled shoes, the moan of bluesman Howlin’ Wolf. It’s Merry Clayton’s wailing descant in the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter,” and it’s even showed itself in me a few time dancing to Block Island’s most famous band, The Booze Beggars, on a Sunday summer afternoon. The soul is electric.
We may feel like victims, think our world is without hope—too many fires to put out and every year they rage higher—but some webs aren’t meant to be escaped. Some are meant to catch the morning dew that glistens with the songs still to be sung until someone sings them.
Look up, Orpheus’s lyre is in the stars, its music pouring down on us like water, refreshing the human event just when we’re about to lose ourselves.
AI may take over the world—one world. That’s probably inevitable. But there are other worlds, and they can exist right here on this one planet. But we must call them to us. Invoke them. And maintain our spells by staying true to our own oscillation granted to us by our souls, stay true to our own individual characters and trust they will merge into something for which we don’t yet have the words.
Our oscillation is the source of our buoyancy, and if we’re going to survive, we are going to need to learn how to float. We can’t rely on the Ark to save us any longer. We also shouldn’t rely on getting swallowed by a whale in order to atone. Correct the distortions as they come. Don’t wait for disaster to do it for us.
And we must stand under the water streaming from the stars, be in awe of every rain storm. Climb onto the turtle’s back again and plant our hearts in sacred ground.
Water is life.
Death is a ritual.
Completion is love.
Part Seven
“There are such cruel tricks I have wondered about in nature, the way a whale must surface to breathe in the presence of its waiting killers, the way the white tails of deer and rabbit are so easily seen as they run from danger, There is something, too, in some human beings that wants to die, that drives us to out own destruction. There is something that makes us trend we are less than we are, less than the other creatures with their face and dignity. Perhaps it is this that makes us bow down to an angry god when we might better have knelt at the altar of our own love.”
-Linda Hogan, Solar Storms
I’m not saying the next flood isn’t coming. I really don’t know. I’m just one human who got dragged down to the Underworld against her will, and then went willfully back a bunch of other times because she thought she needed to earn her place on Earth.
Life, like all true gifts, does not have to be earned, but it does require reciprocity. Given a gift, we must give as well.
Orpheus was given the gift of music that could move stones and make the gods weep. It may seem like he squandered it when he looked back and lost Eurydice, and if he’d gone back up to Earth and lived out the rest of his days as a depressive, maybe that would be true, but he didn’t. He kept singing even after the Maenads clawed him to pieces. He became an oracle when the people of Lesbos plucked his head from the ocean and buried it in the ground. It is time for us now to pick up his lyre. We must become the oracle, not to predict the future or to know the will of the gods, but to actually sing it into form. Remember, Orpheus could move stones with his song.
The Age of Aquarius the band The Fifth Dimension started singing about in the 60s is finally here. That’s an astronomical fact, not just a groovy spiritual concept. Aquarius, known as the Water-Bearer, is generally seen as the sign of the eccentric rebel. It’s odd the sign is ruled by stern taskmaster Saturn, but not so odd when you realize how many people would die thirsty without a clay jug, a tight-woven basket, even a plastic jug. Saturn creates structures. We can’t carry the water without a vessel.
In the Age of Pisces, just past, water slipped through our fingers. We couldn’t bear it. Its weight crushed our lungs if we dove down too deep. We couldn’t hear the whale songs.
Now we have recording equipment that can survive all that pressure. Technology has revealed a wonder of the deep and the World Wide Web has cast the whales’ spell in an accessible way around the world. It’s time to sing ourselves back to the stars. It’s time to refresh our souls in the origin of water. It’s time to remember where we came from, why we are here, and choose where we are going with feet firmly planted in the ground. It’s time to resolve to keep trying despite any odds. Life will keep initiating us until the legacy of love is assured. Become the vessel.
Quiet friend who has come so far, feel how your breathing makes more space around you. Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength. Move back and forth into the change. What is it like, such intensity of pain? If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine. In this uncontainable night, be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses, the meaning discovered there. And if the world has ceased to hear you, say to the silent earth: I flow. To the rushing water, speak: I am. —Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29, Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Joanna Macey
Kō aloha lā ea
Concentrate on love by way of the light
Announcement
I am opening up my personal, embodied calendar for those who want to explore their own depths through metaphysical writing in all genres, while expanding their potential to move readers through writing that is rooted and soars. Writers of all levels are welcome to reach out to discuss how we can be of service to the world through reanimating the English language as a tool of enchantment in the highest sense of the word.
Enchantment: c. 1300, enchauntement, "act of magic or witchcraft; use of magic; magic power," from Old French encantement "magical spell; song, concert, chorus," from enchanter "bewitch, charm," from Latin incantare "enchant, cast a (magic) spell upon," from in- "upon, into" (from PIE root *en "in") + cantare "to sing" (from PIE root *kan- "to sing").
To schedule a free consult, contact me, Jennifer Lighty, at waveofchange@gmail.com or leave a message by responding to this email.