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 appears to the bare eye as the brightest spark of the night sky. The Maya viewed Venus as an inspiration for empowerment, choosing the Yellow Star moment to exercise virility in inter-tribal warfare. We, from Greco-Roman mythology, tend to remember Venus/Aphrodite as an ode to beauty and love. The key integration of these two spiritual legacies is to offer both the feminine and masculine aspects of self a Venusian identity in this time: for men it is the beauty of power, and for women the power of beauty.

The triggers of that last statement are assured. Men are denigrated routinely in our modern culture for wielding power over others; women are considered superficial if they over-commit to their outward image. So let us clarify or deepen these phrases, beauty of power, power of beauty. Male strength is not necessarily to attack and kill others in aggression, or any residual echoes such as simply being an asshole, defensive/offensive and manipulating situations egoically so as to protect himself. Female beauty is not augmenting nature – plastic surgery, anti-aging manifestos, the slick layer of make up plus hair color – and is neither just a means to woo a man and secure her own economic or emotional security.

Yellow Rose I by David J. Bookbinder

Instead, we want the raw, original divine images within these phrases, and to explore the polarity between masculine and feminine energy they hold. In ancient archetypes, men had to be strong enough to hunt and provide food for their families, for those more vulnerable in physiology – children, elders and women whose inherent softness was their womb. Men went to war probably for the same testosterone-driven rationales as ever, but they were forced to make choices of territorial defense based on their own levels of courage and physical power. They didn’t have a computer to manage massive bombing with a fingertip, but carried their offensive and defensive strategies entirely as personal weapons and their training in the art of war.

Women’s beauty still and always led to their attraction of a mate, but perhaps in the original picture of beauty, feminine grace was much closer to the animal kingdom. If we look at birds, it is the males who have the extreme plumage with flashes of bright color – showy flames to shock any predator – and the females who are colored to blend with the dirt and foliage they nest within. The security of a species depends on the feminine protection of the home, hearth, while the masculine patrols the peripheries, gathering food and tracking against any danger. In this metaphor, a woman’s deepest grace is her harmony with her natural surroundings and ability to stand on her own and as guard to a family when the male presence has receded to the distance for his own task as protector.

Yellow Daylily II by David J. Bookbinder

We can either fully embody this animal truth we hold within our womanhood, or play with adjustments. We can embrace the purest feminine form of our species in an ebb and flow like the tides held in our womb, our moon. Sometimes our gift is to blend effortlessly into the beauty of nature, creating a reassurance for our children, and the vulnerable elders who have become more childlike, that we are ourselves the earth goddess, the divine mother, so they feel held and safe. When these dependents need us less – such as when the men are back from the far reaches – we don’t have to blend with the background and can shine more brightly. We may choose to be like the flashes of nature’s beauty that attract attention: gems, the glitter of sunlight on water, a spectral orange sunrise, and the luminescent glow of the full moon.

The danger for women is trying to be like men and flashing self-defensive color flares (anger, aggression) all the time. The danger for men is to blend so much with nature that they aren’t shocking to any predator, and are overrun. This is a metaphoric role reversal: the men can’t secure the boundaries because they have lost their vibrant, shocking spark and strength, and women are forced, deep at the heart center of the tribe, to find war paint and weaponry to defend their families and themselves without the outlying masculine shield.

Yellow Daffodil by David J. Bookbinder

The Yellow Star connection to all this storytelling is deep. We are invited in this wavespell to imagine how we can best shine as powerfully and brightly as the heralded Venus in the night sky, so potent she can even be seen against the sunlight of dusk and dawn. We are drawn by the Mayan reverence for this planet as a battle cry, a guide of innate courage and strength, so that we may find ways to create security and stability around us. The vision of feminine and masculine ways of being empowered and beautiful is further inspiration for how we can work apart – but together – to only wage fights that defend peace and harmony.

To be a star, in a simpler image, is to hold a burning flame within and let it shine out of our five-pointed extremities: our feet and hands and the crown of our head. The beauty then is just full embodiment from the heat of our heart center to the edges of our outreach. And this, in turn, describes true beauty for each of us, incarnated as men or women.

White Lily by David J. Bookbinder

So we can downplay the war imagery and imagine these 13 days not to launch into battles against innocents, but as a self-defense against that which would dull our inner spark. Yellow Star is the last wavespell of the Tzolkin count, the completion. It’s a moment of refinement, the last polish of the spectacular jewelry piece you are. The hard work of finding our interior shine through the corroded layers of a granite casing, through scratches and wear that have dulled our reflective surfaces against sunlight – that’s behind us now. If we have any fight left, it’s merely to say, ‘No, you don’t,’ against the forces that would once again come at us and obscure this way we have become radiant. The power we have in this act of self-protection – and protection of others in their vulnerability – is to impress any invasive, destructive presence that we are not available for their darkness and dominion. Our light shines too strongly for this intimidation.

Again, to the feminine and masculine polarities of self. As men, or from the inner masculine of each of us, we use Yellow Star to rediscover our strength, willingness to go the edges for exploration, and the instinctual role of being a protector/provider. This power of creating a circular enclosure of harmony for others, even as we risk our own safety, is our truest overlay of beauty.  For men and women this means looking at our work in the world and seeing if it helps others feel protected, provided for, or does it actually put people at risk. When we ask these pertinent questions, we find right livelihood that supports the planet and her many species.

Nasturtium I by David J. Bookbinder

For women, and the inner feminine, we have a smaller circle to protect, an intimate one we can never remove ourselves from as long as the masculine energy is appropriately distant doing its work. Our role is to take care of our hearts and the soft organs of reproduction, always creative and aligned with nature. Whatever our hurt places, we can’t fail to take care of those who are even more vulnerable. We also have to trust the absence of the masculine; his warriorship demands being far afield. And so our beauty becomes a profound alignment with nature – being natural – and embodying softness within the hard shield of a man’s protective force.

Yellow Star offers us each a moment to arise and shine from the darkness in the select embodiment we’ve been given as men and women. What is your beauty, your art? Explore the interplay of delicacy and strength, brightest sheen and subservience to the much larger sun. Remembering what the Maya didn’t realize, that Venus is a planet reflecting solar energy and light in phases, even, like our moon, we can know that our beauty comes most deeply from beams of enlightenment bouncing off our visages.

Oriental Poppy II by David J. Bookbinder

Jose Arguelles chose three words to describe the Yellow Star. Its power is elegance. This is grace. How we move, dress, speak, and revere in ceremony can be as smooth and delicate as the seasons of nature, or as abrupt as one razored lightning strike. A star in the sky doesn’t have screaming moodswings or seismic shifts. It shines uniformly, from our perspective on earth, without cyclical dark edges. Elegance is an alignment with this harmonious pulse, floating against any black backdrop life offers, and rising above surface chaos.

Yellow Star’s action is to beautify, and we know now that doesn’t mean taut skin and tight abs as much as making the world a more beautiful place. Be a flower in the world, the bloom and scent that brings more peace and tranquility. Clarify your inner beauty so it radiates outward and attracts those creatures who are hungry for your nectar. All aspects of life could be more flowering or like a sparkling river flow, so don’t diminish the desire in this wavespell to clean house, dress like royalty, eat only sushi. We are attracted to create a universe that looks like butterfly wings, even as we recall that a monarch’s bright bull’s eyes are a self-defense weapon to scare the birds who hunt it. Your surface beauty, and that which you create around you, is a healthy means to keep out what would destroy the deepest essence of beauty, your pure life force.

Yellow Star’s essence is art, and so we endeavor in this time to make art – not war, or even money. We can make love if it’s an artistic enterprise – in fact, everything we do will be for art’s sake, heart expression, these 13 days. We make art because it is our version of being a spangle in the night sky – something to awe others or refresh them, a drishti – that point of focus in yoga that stills our bodies as we hold a difficult pose. Yes, war and money will continue to lace the newspaper headlines, but your attention will be on the photograph below where someone is wearing red shoes. We are called towards the places of light, reflections of the sun god, not the contrasting shadows.

Blue Pansy I by David J. Bookbinder

Remembering Blue Eagle –

Last Wavespell’s Learning

Now you know. You saw the map of your life and understand better why some things aren’t working. There’s a roadblock or a high precipice and from the sky you can see what the groundlings are beating their heads against. You know the way out or around. Of course, like a superhero, an eagle’s keen vision is useless unless it muscles down to earth and saves the day, but a bird’s light body is not great for moving mountains, moving targets. So we had to be content in this wavespell to take notes on what the problems are, as well as the solutions, and then leave the legwork to those with much lower centers of gravity – or pulse from our mind down to our first through third chakras an assignment of life change.

Maybe you know, too, what matters, that funny wordplay that describes the material plane on earth. You know from way up high what is important here and now, in ‘real life’ on this planet, in the real time of a great transit for our species. So you are refreshed, have found your soul mate, your right livelihood, your immutable spiritual link to god. This was Blue Eagle’s bonus for retreating to your mind’s eye and not feeling as sentient or sensual for a wavespell. You saw the truth of this moment’s terrain with your own honed gaze: who or what is as central to the topography as a tall mountain or wide waterway.

Use Blue Eagle’s developed loft to rise now to Yellow Star level, another decibel of ascension. We were for 13 days the beholding eye, and now we shift to the trance of beauty being beheld.

Flower Mandala I by David J. Bookbinder