As I am so often asked to target my Natural Time know-how towards questions of the Mayan prophecy of December 21, 2012, I have made a promise to myself to check in with my perceptions of that looming date at a certain passage within every Tzolkin cycle.

The Tzolkin, if you are a novice to Natural Time, is the soul count of the Maya, a 260-day sacred cycle comprised of shamanic names and reverence for the dominant archetypes of Mayan life, of all life. Each day holds an energetic focus that contributes to the greater whole. By following the Tzolkin, we are in turn brought to wholeness and inter-being, from our emersion in an entire panorama of experiences instead of a singular, self-oriented perspective.

The 260-day Tzolkin spin is a mirror of gestation in the human womb, and so that in our spiritual walk we are each seeding and growing life within us, vibrantly creative. The 26,000-year cycle heralded by the Maya and ending – then renewing – on Winter Solstice, 2012, is also about birth. On that morning the sun will rise from the center of the galaxy, from the dark womb of the Milky Way. The prophecy offers that the sun will be reborn, its emergence offering greater illumination to all.

December 21, 2012 is the completion day of this grand processional – the 26,000-year odyssey between moments when from our earth view we see this cosmic rebirth. It can’t be an ending without also being the beginning of the next giant cycle. Yet, truly, it’s an incredible transit, one we are all sensitive to, already, for the galactic alignments already falling into place.

The Tzolkin count is not synchronized with the 26,000-year count, although it is clearly a microcosm and held sacred by the Maya for this reverberation. The Tzolkin does not end on December 21, 2012, but continues through its human gestation cycles – endlessly renewing in conception and rebirth. Winter Solstice of 2012 falls on a day within the Tzolkin called Blue Crystal Hand, the 207^th day of the 260. Periodically, we can experience Blue Crystal Hand as we pass through it in the Tzolkin and use the day’s experience as a model for what be arising when we do wake to that prophetic dawn.

We only have one remaining Blue Crystal Hand day between now and December 21, 2012 – it falls on April 5, 2012. Other recent Blue Crystal Hand passages have fallen on February 14, 2010, November 1, 2010, and July 19, 2011. I am writing from Gregorian date July 20, 2011 – making my cyclical report on the experience I had yesterday of this precursor to the greatest Mayan oracle.

My intention on these days is to simply observe what transpires, and allow myself to have a full human experience that I can then offer as an answer of what all of humanity might expect to behold. I am sad, then, to express that it was not a resilient day of only light – that there was a sinkhole of epic darkness and energetic despair before the sense of renewal and healing could soothe true suffering. I was sad because I hear people fighting to believe that we can rise in this new age of gold luminescence without falling farther into the throes of dark forces. I would wish to agree – but I don’t wholly. I can maintain that we are in that black out now, fighting against an aggressive demon essence that does increase war and famine and the greed that promotes both. I can personally feel blessed I don’t live in a war zone or refugee camp, that in the First World of coastal California I am shielded from human atrocities and natural disasters – thus far.

My sense yesterday of Blue Crystal Hand was that in this prophetic transit we will be unified by an all-inclusive anguish. That there will not be this sorting by region or financial resources – a greater force will oppress us equally in a flare of catastrophic change. For me, it came like a blunt force attack: I witnessed a beloved in such a state of egoic fear that they forgot their heart center, their courage to love. As they lost their compassion for self, for others, all the dark angels were fed, a nightmarish arising and filling the space where there was once loving connection.

This in any of our lives might look like a fight, a rupture in connection, that escalates to be no longer the discord of two in present time – but the memories of earlier wars in childhood, in the ancestral line we come from, and in another lifetimes we experienced in our soul journeying. Blue Crystal Hand is the twelfth day of a larger cycle, the Yellow Warrior wavespell. Already, in this time, we are asked to fight. It’s 13 days committed to everything from donning a shield – erecting our defense structures – to using hand-to-hand combat for our own survival. It’s only when we come to Blue Crystal Hand that we put down our weapons and free our fingers, palms to heal. So the Blue Crystal Hand experience I received was watching the final firework of a devastating detonation – the bomb destroying so much in order for the balm to be applied. This word play, and the invitation on lay down our arms in order to lay our hands on each other, seems to me the truest augury of the Mayan prophecy so fast approaching.

For each of our sensitivities, we suffer accordingly. It doesn’t mean that the planet will be cast into Biblical levels of strife – but it could feel that way to those with receptors to an unseen world. For me, yesterday, there was no war but some ungentle words. Still, I was struck – truly – by the way that fed darkness and suffering in my soul, and I plunged into ancient anguish that seemed to encompass not only my singular human life experience, but greater humanity’s touchstone of pain through the ages: Wounded Knee, burning witches, the first idea of enslaving African villagers, a plague that opened Europe to its Enlightenment. My small rupture in a bond of love fed me a whole history of uprooted unrest. I realized that we remember these holocausts of our human history as the ironic basis of why we actually fight: for peace.

I offer that stark insight to you – that Blue Crystal Hand holds a memory bank of soul suffering – in order to incite readiness in your heart, a fortitude and fearlessness. Perhaps in the countdown to the prophesied dawn, it becomes healthier to not necessarily invite pain but to allow it. I would describe it as disaster preparedness through prayer and ritual. We can’t stop fate, but we can yield to it and have the same sense of closeness to Creator that might otherwise feel like being abandoned to only destructive forces. The difficulties of the prophetic transit can be then like birth pains, contractions and hard labor. We can’t rise to a new dawn without the proverbial darkest night beforehand. We can trust that whatever challenge we are living through personally, or in the planetary realm, is growing pain.

What held me in my center during yesterday’s surging turmoil – guided it was by catalytic Blue Storm – was the Tzolkin itself. I knew the Yellow Warrior wavespell was all but complete, and this energetic upheaval was the last battle. I knew that Blue Hand is about healing, and the Crystal tone is for co-operation – a homecoming from the hero’s journey of the wavespell when all gather together in celebration and commemoration of the challenges we overcame. I trusted that if I waited the few hours for sunset, dusk, the Dreamtime, I would go to sleep in peace. Blue Crystal Hand is a promise of touch, of hands reconnected, grasping and soothing. Sometimes there is pain in order to remember reconnection – the assault wedging its way into separations we have created, that disaster dissolves. I am thrown in with you by a power greater than either of us – dark and haunting, hunting – but when we reunite from fear or trauma, we outnumber the invisible demons with our combined cellular warmth.

To me, then, from yesterday’s experiential teaching – this is my present picture of the greater transit of our times. I don’t doubt the ascended Maya are caretaking us through this tumult. I don’t doubt we will be guided and guarded from the worst pain. I do believe it’s our fate in the First World to be equalized with other pockets of suffering removed from our sight in the sterility of our modern and materialistic appetites. This laptop I write on is my gateway to the world, but it’s an illusory mold of plastic and electricity  that cuts me off from sensory experiences of day and night. I own my part in being out of touch with indigenous truths offered in the Tzolkin spin: sun, moon, star, storm.

At the completion of yesterday’s arc of suffering and healing, I made my way into nature, a hillside hovering above the city where the moon burned orange on the horizon line. I sat against a tree, felt both chill and waves of warmth in the changing atmosphere, and listened to animals on their night crawl. I don’t do this enough, but the holiday, holy day, of Blue Crystal Hand called me out of my habit patterns and into the constellations of the starlit sky. When we don’t have what we think we want, we still have this. We have it, and we are it, one with the cosmos through the Mayan teaching.

My spiritual strategy for enduring and transcending the times we are in is to follow faithfully the Tzolkin calendar. The Maya have given us this resource to steady our way through the cosmic storm. If we join together through their shamanic legacy, we will be formidable in the sea of darkness, the womb we are falling out of into renewed light.

In lake’ch,

Lisa