Elegance – Beautifies – Art

Yellow Star is the last of the 20 aspects of our environment celebrated in the Tzolkin (soul count) 260-day calendar. The glyph is a depiction of the planet Venus that shines so brightly in the sky it reduces other spangles to mere glints of light compared to its radiant splendor. Maybe we aren’t as amazed by Venus, since it competes with everything from streetlamps to flat screen television, but the Maya were. For them, the piercing light was a beacon for virility, the call to war. Yellow Star was a perfect moment to launch a tribal attack against neighbors, to paint their bodies and assemble shields and weaponry for warriorship, territorial offense. Like the star itself, each side vied to loom largest, brightest, to dominate the land mass of earth as Venus outshines all others in the night sky.

War, then, had a certain natural harmony, and of course we can’t relate to that in the modern age, where it feels dirty, greedy, cruel, and fueled by dishonor. But it was for men in indigenous times the primal act of defending peace, circling the boundaries of the tribal place and securing the women, children and home life within. The battles themselves were man to man, hand to hand, or whispers of arrows launched in the air like bird flight. To die in combat was to cross regally to higher heavens, to align with Venus and the other stars. Nature reminded everyone then of death – no bypass surgery extensions, no free time for the yoga practice that brings eternal youth – and to form in war was not alien at all but the true nature of a man, death as inevitable, agreeable and a psalm of heroism. We can remember this as we as a civilization, a species, are facing challenges of survival that look a lot like old world territorial rampages. We need a resolute warrior force to help us get through the necessary destruction of one epoch, the dawn of another.

It’s also important when we enter the Yellow Star wavespell in the modern age to reevaluate our conceptions of beauty. Of course we herald Venus through Greco-Roman mythology, where Aphrodite is the goddess of beauty, the alluring wonder of womanhood, mother of Eros/Cupid, and so progenitor of divine, romantic love. For women, it is true that if we can walk in visual beauty in the world we become its field of flowers, fallen stars that still shine brightly, and draw love from the ethers to spread among our offspring, into our partnerships. But for men, this time is a reclamation of a different kind of beauty and sheen. Beauty for men is less soft, succulent radiance, fancy hairstyles and fragrance, than virility, inner strength and determination, the fire inside that fuels perseverance. A man’s vitality, in war, or in being a shield in human society, is the way he burns energy and emits light, his stardom.

It’s a his and hers divergence point in this final wavespell, a culmination of the Tzolkin spin that reminds us that while feminine and masculine essences unite to create, procreate life, they do it through a balance and convergence of opposite, innate gifts. Women, to the left – receptive – will coif more, dress with more ceremonial refinement, find themselves adorned, bejeweled, in gowns instead of jeans, with natural, accidental elegance. Men, on the right – directive – will be feeling into their musculature, physical strength, endurance, the toning that comes from an inner hunger to take risks and enact a barrier against invaders. You will be planning and preparing for a plan of attack, a deep risk that could bring you to psychic, if not physiological, edges of death energy.

We are so steeped in images of feminine beauty, but they are persistently airbrushed, whitewashed, plastic. The art of womanhood is the glow of ovulation, pregnancy, the intense darkness of more woeful passages in menstruation, in accepting losses in childbirth, men to war. When we as women are beautiful in Yellow Star, we are simply ignited light against a black backdrop and all we have to do is shine our open hearts, a clear sign to men of what they are coming home to.

Men have two impulses in this time, and maybe in all time. One is to fight the right fight, prepared with ritual adornment and tools of self-protection. You are supposed to get to the outskirts and protect the tribal territories, be away from womankind and that invitation towards softness. Hard, fierce, aligned with animal instinct, animal strength, you are called by Venus to your true essence of tracker, stalker, warrior, defender, fearlessness. The other side of this effort towards intensity, commitment, engagement, directivity is when the task of war (fighting for your life, your honor, the safety of others) is over. After time in the starshine of a fully masculine endeavor, you gravitate to the beauty you have defended: the pacific homeland and the jewels of your children, your wife.

It seems impossibly simple that men’s fundamental soul purpose would be the switch from revering the beauty of a Yellow Star in the sky to the beauty of the Yellow Star in their feminine counterparts, but it’s the message of this moment. For women, we have to embody astral light, be visible, central, attractive to the gaze of those who are lost, in darkness, waylaid on their journey; we maintain the flame of the hearth, the flame of our hearts. For men, you have to forget lesser light sources – the bright fluorescence of a ball game, the invitations of the Internet, any digital commerce that never stretches your arm muscles – and find your way into the crucial battleground of your incarnation. And when you have won, you have to find your way back home for rest and reassurance that it was worth the losses you saw around you. This means, between men and women, cultivating the home that can be left, the home that lasts through the leaving, is a place of patience and peace. In the Yellow Star glyph, the bright diamond beam is surrounded by four other points: the cardinal directions, the seasons, the foundational beams of a house. At the center of it all is radiant beauty that begets love.

Jose Arguelles chose three words to describe the Yellow Star. Its power is elegance. There are many ways to be a star, and in our culture most of us revere and secretly want that astral title. In this wavespell, we are not after the sterile, shiny smile of a beauty contestant but the grace and refinement of a lifelong dancer. Each of us started in infancy with a strengthening spine and within it a unique gift for this lifetime we will stand tall in, and have practiced with constancy, whether we are aware of it or not. In this part of our existence, we are fluid, expansive, centered, elegant. Others admire our ease, confidence. Maybe you don’t recognize it in yourself, it’s so much a part of you, but in the Yellow Star time, a beam of starlight will reveal it, and others will comment in admiration of your particular spangle of superstardom.

Yellow Star’s action is to beautify, and so you will. House, clothes, the way dinner is laid out on a plate: your attention now is on noticing how prettily our world is made. You will be attracted to that which is couched in beauty, will want to support it and create it as well. Sushi will win over murky stews, the sinew of trees over the scratch of sidewalks, and you will want to be as beautiful as the surroundings drawing you back to harmony, glittering light, a gem-filled sky. Maybe it’s just how you look at things that’s different, that the inner eye becomes astonished by a crow’s tarry blackness, almost obsidian, when usually you find it blocky and dull compared to a hummingbird’s delicate iridescence.

Yellow Star’s essence is art, everything from the art of war to the child’s first discovery that you can make a five-pointed star with one continuous, sacred line. In describing the workings of the Tzolkin and 13 Moon calendars, Jose Arguelles rephrased the expression, ‘Time is money,’ to ‘Time is art.’ In our new economy, waiting patiently to be in the wake of this crumbling old one, we will each be asked to offer services and products that are our truest art expression. The emphasis will be on what we give, not what we get in return. Using our natural gifts, we can make our offerings endlessly, without exhaustion and the dark moods of feeling inauthentic that come with money-minded work. We will finish our tenure as humans on this planet with the same energy we finish the Tzolkin in this wavespell: everybody is an artist, everybody is a star.

Remembering Blue Eagle –
Last Wavespell’s Learning

It was brutal to have such a keen gaze, to take in the disruptions of our own lives seen on high as well as the peripheral peeks we had into those of our outlying neighbors. You were so high up you lost sense of your lower organs, perhaps, your grounding, You may have been stern, critical, insensitive as you relied so much on sight, unable to touch tenderly through those talons. You also saw key solutions that could not be conceived as easily from a sea level view. There are well-worn paths through long distances, made by our ancestors and animal guides, that you suddenly rose high enough to discover.

And what about those birds, their insights and offerings? Dropping feathers so readily as the summer heats up, they reflected everything we also have had to let go of to be lighter, heading towards Yellow Star’s radiance. If the birds called to you was it cheerful singing – a Disney cartoon moment – or the disruptive railing of distress on behalf of the humans whose anxiety keeps boiling over and evaporating into their flight zones?

What was your big picture view, your wide angle discovery of yourself? You learned one tremendous thing, a distillation you could never have captured from ground zero. It could have been simply that sometimes you can rise above, distance yourself into solitude, find solace in your mind. Or it may have been a cold, cerebral truth, and chilled your heart warmth, love of self and others. It’s a necessary rising we do in Blue Eagle, but the importance of the time is also it’s ending: now, filled with vision, a map of your life, get back into the tread of your path, this earth, your body.