Embedded

One of the lovely things about Joburg is, as you barrel down the highway at 5 in the morning, headed for the pretentious and poorly constructed office park you work in, you can still see vast swathes of sky, unto the horizon in places.
And at 5 in the morning in mid-July, it is still pitch dark - and so you can see the stars, or as much of them as pervasive light pollution will allow.

Orion is sprawled along the eastern join of earth and sky, reclining on his massive side, while Sirius shines clear just beneath him.

The heliacal rising of Sirius, I think. Come down to us, the concept has, from a culture which was so embedded in the river Nile that its well being was inseparable from that venerable flow of water. The Egyptian year would start around now, just before the rising of the Nile's waters in fecundity.

The Khoisan marked this rising of the brightest star just before the sun, too - but being hunter-gatherers, they had perhaps a broader view of its provenance. They believed it was an eye. An eye, perhaps, of the Old One - grandmother of us all, a Being beyond time and space, whose only ingress into the terrestrial plane was the glinting of her astral eye.

The Egyptians, you see - they were embedded, the Khoisan not so much. Yet which people loved the land the better?

I am daily surrounded by folks whose greatest thoughts are linked to their desires to own. Cars, large houses, electronic gadgetry...other people. They have lost something so precious, so core to their well being, that their lives are an endless round of trying to make up the loss, to plug the gap, to avoid the roaring abyss. And so vast sums of money are thrown at automobiles which cost more than my house, at changing the wardrobe to keep up with the fickle dictates of fashion, at flimsy goods of metal and poison which somehow, they believe, add stature to the person who possesses them.

This is a form of being embedded, too - a form lethal to soul and spirit. As we are all contractions of energy in the fabric of the All, so are most wealthy people contractions of greed, and hunger, and soul-thirsting of which they are all but unconscious. And among the wealthy I include, of course, myself. For the contractions in the ether, the knots in the fabric, are constructed of material possessions as well as consciousness. And those of us who share 90 percent of all the wealth on the material plane comprise less than 5 percent of the populace of the planet.

It's not working so well. So, as I watch the smoke from my cigarette coil and expand its way out of the car, I find myself wishing my spirit would also rise, break these chains of density, and find its way back into the vastness from which it arose once - and will again, and will again. Until we learn how to untie these knots in the fabric of the Real.

Photo found at photo.com