Flowering – Target – Awareness

Yellow Seed is one of the 20 aspects of our environment celebrated in the Tzolkin (soul count) 260-day calendar. The glyph image is easy to grok – a seed drops deep into the earth, down a hole like the one we press with our finger when we start a garden bed. The seed itself is split into a Mayan yin-yang of duality, a reminder that everything we encounter, from conception to fruition, is made from polarity, including ourselves. Furthermore, the hole also has a line of division, a track of sorts to keep the seed oriented down the middle of necessary extremes. Yellow Seed is about plant formation, as well as the seeding we do as humans, man to woman for the creation of new life. The seed channel of the glyph reminds us of the masculine and feminine elements that always dovetail and coincide, and the key to the wavespell is to find the balance of these energies, of all energies that represent divine opposition.

The Yellow Seed wavespell is another spectacular highlight in the broader Tzolkin spin. It holds a seminal portal run just as we experienced in the Red Serpent wavespell: ten days of open doors where there were once walls, of gateway energy pulling us through. In the transcendent era of discovering hallucinogenics, circa the Sixties and Seventies, people blew their minds by pushing past the limits of rationality and the material world. The portal days have the same impetus, and each of us will be led on an accelerated path towards soul expansion, synthesizing the dream world with our everyday awakening. The portals of the Yellow Seed wavespell have a much different tone than the Red Serpent’s. In the experience of slithering out of a dry, tight snake skin we were compelled to look one more time at all we no longer needed – what once protected us and was supple but had been outgrown, used up. The Red Serpent wavespell is all about emerging from the past, a final honoring as we push through its teachings one more time. It’s often sickening to feel so confined and coerced to look at what no longer serves us.

Yellow Seed has an opposite feel. As the seed drops down to the base of a hole, preparing to establish roots and move back up through the soil layers to the light, we are watching the future we will grow towards. It’s very much like the picture of Alice in Wonderland falling down the rabbit hole and finding the oddest items dangling from the earthen walls. These end up being strong symbols and auguries for the psychedelic adventure she is embarking on, and we will find the same guideposts as the portals unwind. We see the seeds of future developments, taste them like Alice and have responding surges of growing large, shrinking. We are invited into confusion, the chaos of not being able to decipher the clues or the bodily shifts we are thrown into. The Yellow Seed portal column is unstable only because it leads us into the unknown; in reality we are stepping deep into a preview of our future knowing.

Yellow Seed has a mystical relationship to earth’s soil and goddess energy, is mentored by it. There are the nutrients to be found in the rich darkness, the secret enchantments that will give the seed strength to expand, split apart, shoot like a star upwards. But as with any life teaching, the process is away from the teacher, into autonomy and independence and ultimately the ability to teach others in turn. Yellow Seed invites us to really savor this earth – the population of people, animals, the plants and their spirit nature, the composite minerals that rest like ancestral remains – and also move beyond it towards the sky. We could start the wavespell tracking along the planet’s surface – walks and meditations on the bare dirt of the winter season – and then feel an invitation to lift off into a bloom that is much more skyward. Yellow Seed is all about the protein-rich nugget from which a full flower or tree unfurls, but it is also the outcome of a giant, leafy sprawl – a pungent, rainbow scent – and each of us will grow from tight compression into an expansive, lacy extension upward. We are back to the cosmic trip of plant medicine psychotropics: rooted in the earth, we feel our upper chakras open like fireworks into the heavens.

Jose Arguelles chose three words to describe the Yellow Seed. Its power is flowering. Feel the phrase deeply: your superpower for this wavespell is to explode in bloom, moving from a tight mono-hued green that matches all the other plant life on earth into outlandish bright color. It’s like dressing up for a costume ball after days in khakis or basic black. We are instructed in this time to come out of hiding, to blow ourselves open – our minds or hearts – and to affect others likewise in turn. We become irresistible to the flying flowers – birds and butterflies and bees. We are seductive, syrupy, not just sensitive but emitting and dripping sensuality. We are alternately vulvic or penile with our stamens and pollinated orifices. Within the word ‘flower’ is flow, and so we are not static, either, but streaming, a channel of growth and movement. We are soft and lush, cradling the dew.

The action of Yellow Seed is to target, and this is a reminder of the need to find the best site for planting, the richest soil to root into. First we innately determine what won’t work: a granite rock, a swamp of salt water, desert dust. We keep rolling with the wind currents or within a bird’s belly until we can arrive in dark dirt, remembering that the best nutrients come from recent death. In recent wavespells, each of us has had plenty to let go of, buried and turned repeatedly until it decayed beyond specific remembrance. Now we can celebrate that all that work of facing death and giving it credence, a place in our garden, allows us to regenerate. We can move towards what almost killed us with its call towards decomposition, sit on that pile of quasi-shit like a throne. We run often away from this kind of darkness, but now we dig into it pointedly, hungry for the transformation to new life.

The essence of Yellow Seed is awareness. The sensitivity of a plant is greater than we realize. There are no vocal cords for the trees burned out of the rainforest, but certainly at their soul level they feel thrown into the pyre of sacrifice, suffering as much as the pagans and shamans, the female prophets, historically burned at the stake. Plants respond simply and directly to the shifts in their midst. The morning glory opens for the sun, closes in shade. We as humans are the same but afraid to admit our dependency on nature’s cycles – even while we ache for the missing simplicity. In the Yellow Seed time, we are simple, folding ourselves open to light, curving into a bowl for rainfall and closed to cold, even dead to it. We are aware of the symptoms of life force around us – and respond fast, effortlessly. We can’t mechanize or manipulate our experience. As humans in a Yellow Seed wavespell, we become aware of the seeds, flowers (vegetables) processing through us as food, and that for all the protein pellets inside us we are ourselves bouquets of soft petals and prickly thorns. Nothing feels like flesh in this time, with bone and sinew. We are branches, fiber, fragrance, aware of that mirror in nature and not of the evolution into asphalt, plastic and aluminum cans.

Remembering Blue Monkey –

Last Wavespell’s Learning

We took one big evolutionary step backwards and didn’t really give a shit anymore about accomplishment, amassing material excess (although we probably fancied a banana-like bauble or two), or the specifics of past experience. We were caught in the now, noticing it got cold or dark in season and felt like doing not so much about it – not in the human frame of mind to use superpowers to sublimate nature’s call. Maybe we couldn’t swing as freely from the trees – our playfulness limited to the sunshiney noon hours – but we also didn’t have the energy or inclination to worry about conditions that are almost winter. See no, hear no, speak no evil: we took it all in loping stride.

Blue Monkey was the reminder of the animal essence of our human form. We know from the Yellow Human tour that to invoke a beautiful human condition is to use our free will to protect and preserve other life forms on earth. Blue Monkey allowed us to be unburdened of our food chain dominance as well as our guilt from misusing it. Instead we felt like goofing off with all our toys, or without them, back to jungle basics of a simple vine, other living creatures, and the joy of our own supple limbs.

We need to disconnect from being solely people and remember to embody all parts of the earth and cosmos, a grand scale soul retrieval where we bring back the fragments of self that are star, eagle, invisible breath.  The Tzolkin invites us to limit the experience of Yellow Human to one wavespell out of twenty. Blue Monkey was part of this diversification of our experience, a deep remembering of our own pre-historic guise. We looked deeper than into inner childhood and found our inner primate, a primal animal nature that is only inclined towards laughter.