So, just as I was enjoying the clean, slightly windswept, grass-crunchy Winter in Joburg -and being just two weeks from Mid Winter's day, hearing already the sistrum rattles of Isis calling Osiris back to the world- we got hit by a very unusual thunder storm.
The wind started getting up around 9:30-ish in the evening, as the Moon crossed into Virgo. The loud rattling of the bedroom windows and the metallic thumping back and forth of the 6 ft high steel gate which divides the garden woke me up several times. And then the dogs were in the bedroom, wanting to go out to relieve themselves. As I tried to get back to sleep, the room was lit brightly by the first flash of lightning, followed of course by the roll of the first clap of thunder. Not much sleep was had, in the end, and the dreams were as bizarre as this completely out-of-time bit of weather.
A couple of months ago, I heard Christina talk about the lack of initiation for adults in today's world, and how this could help explain the broken society we live in. For broken it is – beyond the ability of simple meditation techniques to fix, I'm afraid, and beyond all the green-toilet-paper-buying, electricity-saving, recycling actions of the good folk to remedy.
The good folk themselves, meanwhile, are more and more closely resembling children: spoiled, selfish, ego-driven children whose first thought is not of the beautiful world in which we live, or the beautiful souls of various species who share it with us, but of themselves, their wants and needs and desires and bugger the consequences. Just as long as the ego is sated and satisfied, never mind the deeper, more poignant connections with All of Life.
And the reason may very well be something as apparently simple as lack of initiation into adulthood.
I don't mean that everyone should undergo a full Shamanic Dismemberment as I have had, of course: the world would soon be awash in pain and tears if we all had to travel that path. But there is indeed meat for some and milk for others – and most of us are being fed neither, spiritually speaking.
Pic: my west altar
Children, that's apt, especially men.
ReplyDeleteBut there are bits all over where they try imitate these initiation rituals, from the catholic thing to scouts and similar.
But it takes a shaman, with a real understanding of each individual, not a well meaning parent or priest.
Especially not priests.
peace