Blue Crystal Hand: Precursor to the 2012 Prophecy

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 207th 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

What is going to happen in 2012?

I get asked this question all the time, and my short answer is, ‘It’s already happening.’ The transit of Winter Solstice, 2012 is the end – and beginning – of a 26,000-year cycle, so we are feeling its intensity now, the outlying pre-verberations already palpable.

As a scholar/teacher of other, shorter Mayan cycles, I am most interested in the present moment of a passing day in the Tzolkin sacred calendar and its now-centered shamanic description.

However, every once in a while, I can feel into the energy of 12/21/12 – we all can – by experiencing the Tzolkin precursor to that paradigm shift. On the 260-day Mayan soul count, in Natural Time, Winter Solstice of 2012 will be Blue Crystal Hand, the 12th day of the Yellow Warrior wavespell. Blue Crystal Hand has fallen in the Gregorian year 2010 on Valentine’s Day, and on November 1, 2010 the Day of the Dead.

This most recent Blue Crystal Hand day made the approaching augury of 2012 starkly apparent to me. From my experience of that day’s energy, it’s going to be intense, feel like suffocating in some ways – too sleepy – and in that torpor of basic survival we will not get very much done. We have to trust the outreach – open hands and hearts – to each other, in interdependence, because standing alone in isolation is practically irresponsible with so many circling predatory energies coming loose around us.

The arguments, under stress, may be thick like the Yellow Warrior wavespell encourages: sparring self-defense structures and the mix up of pushing away that which we really want to hold close. All we can do is name these resistances for each other – support one another in becoming strongly clear when there is a cloud of confusion in our midst. This is the operative teaching of 2012’s breakdowns, however they manifest: we have to be closer to and careful of each other, helping create clarity and peace while things become chaotic.

For my part, I want to tell one story of my Blue Crystal Hand day within the modern culture. I chose to watch the World Series of baseball, honoring my mother-in-law’s influence on my daughter’s – she is Blue Crystal Hand and her favorite team, the San Francisco Giants, has never seen a World Series win. The Giants are a self-described band of misfits, and their startling season of dominance has come after decades of near-wins and never wins. There are young players who break records with their virginal innocence on the field, and older ones who have watched the lowest lows of losing.

They have been playing the Texas Rangers through this Yellow Warrior wavespell’s culminating days, first in their home park of crazy-freaky San Francisco, then in the Ranger stadium. The Rangers used to be owned by George Bush, Jr. and he was featured throwing the ball, stirring the national anthem, and alongside his now nearly-crippled father in a golf cart. I have seen so little of him these past two years, I felt practically nostalgic. And I felt happy that his oddly malignant reign is over. For some of us, to see George Bush(es) on the eve of a spate of elections where Republicans are angry for vindication is another moment of shock at what our culture asks of us. Must we recede into hollow, stifled thought? Can we not step free and easily into progressive awakening?

The point, really, is that the World Series was a culture war of some importance, in metaphor and truth. The San Francisco mayhem – long hair, long beards over-dyed black, mere kids on the mound, and so much loss in their history – took its act to the wide open Lone Star state, where despite having an African-American coach, I could not find even one person of any racial identity besides blank white in the stands. In this irony of open Anglo hierarchy, with two ex-presidents presiding over the field, came the New Age blow to our civilization’s presumption that we can rest in comfortable homogeneity any longer.

On Blue Crystal Hand, I watched for the fortune teller’s preview of 2012, and I found this: on 12/21/12, the old guard will turn out to try to once more to be undefeated, inimitable, owner of the spoils. Their tenaciousness will become a kind of tension that snaps and breaks irreparably, and looseness will reign. In that new, free flowing stream of unbound energy, there will be misfits who exude calm joy and concentrate on their breath – like the 21 year old pitcher who doesn’t yet know how to get tightly wound. The ease and grace of what’s righteous, given to us for healing by the Creator, will prevail. The struggle will not be for those who have learned through time to let life be less serious – or were born comparatively carefree. It will be for all who still have selfishness, self-preservation as their first personal freedom.

We are all both sides of this expression of change. When I saw the young pitcher win the game for San Francisco through repeated outreaching gestures of an unleashed high speed ball, I felt he was another myself. And when I saw the broken will of the losing fans, who might characteristically turn on their team spitefully as failures, I still saw myself – past or future inclinations to be angry and bitter, covering hurt and disappointment, a lack of control over what I’d rather was only, always easy.

When I saw George Bush, Jr. driving his father around in a golf cart and the hobbling, the facial resemblance, the harrowing history they co-created evident in their expressions of shock at a life of strange karma – I saw myself in them. This is the spiritual readiness we need to amass in this (G)iant transit of 2012. We need to be large enough souls to depersonalize darkness – not ascribe it to a Bush dynasty, a Texas mob, another ourself. We need to see darkness as a call to light and enter it fearlessly, hands first, reaching for connection instead of to admonish or shame. We can hold those who push us away, even. The merry pranksters who embody the current Giants team are coyote-monkey magicians who know how to enjoy the game of life, and it’s infectious.

Whether you like baseball, whether you saw the game, I offer this picture of 2012 to you. It’s going to be those who are young, wild seed and love to play outshining those whose ways are too secularized, in service to select few, unvariegated, plain white. It’s not going to be easy for the parts of ourselves that are still blank canvases, or bleached from too much sun at the expense of others hidden in shadow – but in the end it will be a spray of celebratory champagne for the inner joy in us that finally cracked and exploded to match and merge with the universal light.

George Bush, Sr. - Blue Overtone Eagle

George Bush, Jr. - Red Crystal Moon

Tim Lincecum - White Electric Mirror & age 26

Madison Bumgarner - White Electric Dog

Buster Posey - Red Self-Existing Skywalker (same as Barack Obama)

Edgar Renteria - White Galactic Worldbridger (same as Hilary Clinton)

Texas statehood - Yellow Cosmic Warrior

California statehood - Red Rhythmic Serpent

Next Blue Crystal Hand - July 19, 2011