Current Wavespell

Flowering – Target – Awareness

Yellow Seed is one of 20 aspects celebrated by the Maya as day names around which to orient their spiritual life. The glyph image is easy to track – a seed (not an aspirin tablet) drops into a hole in the earth. The hole is like the one we press with our finger when we start a garden bed, so within this picture is our own decisive part in beginning a fruitful harvest. The seed itself is split into a Mayan yin-yang of duality. Everything we encounter, from conception to fruition, is made from polarity, including ourselves. Rather than calling the difference between black and white ‘good and bad’, try sensing night and day, darkness and light.

In the life of a seed growing into a flower, both are essential. A seed thrown in the sun without cover will only bake; a seed planted deep in soil on sunless days will have nothing to stretch towards and rot. We follow that metaphor in our spiritual growth: in this wavespell, expect to see shadows and heavenly light, and be willing to explore both. Reach towards enlightenment, but don’t blind yourself with it, ignoring bodily needs for cool and wet. Feel into the cave you are holed up in – a good place for fortifying yourself into something earthen, solid, creating your own brand of materialism – but aim in all you are creating for an ascension that guides others also toward the light.

In other words, what you sow you shall reap. What we plant these days is literally out of our hands. We can choose the seed strain, our favorite flowers, and make fingerlets in the dirt to drop them into. Then we have to let go and pray for favorable conditions, a good divine flow like water, a balance of sunshine and rain (joy/evocative pain), a blessing from the sky and earth gods that we may have the abundance of bloom and nourishment. If you sow prayer, gratitude, appreciation for the slow process of nature’s growth, you will be delighted by whatever seedlings pop up, tiny green tendrils individuating into vines, tubers, and ultimately a full harvest meal. If you sow specific wish lists, demands for full coverage, no loopholes in your need for ease and accomplishment, you may get locusts and blight.

Yellow Seed is an active time for each of us to initiate a process that empowers our most basic nourishment: whatever we plant now will lead to food, clothing, shelter. These may sound like Third World provisions – where is the electric car and the yoga retreat hedge fund? – but maybe it’s high time to see our globe as One World, and check that we really do have universal health and human care, seeds of simplicity, equality and compassion for all. Each person needs what comes from the earth, and so we must constantly re-seed the soil for more output. A picture of our civilization now is of over-reaping, under-sowing, and dirt depleted of its minerals.

If we First Worlders are accountable for the rape of the land, we will accept eating simply this fall, and the next, allowing fields to lie fallow and regenerate. If we continue to mine other cultures for their resources, we may eat well but have spiritual hunger. Check this reckoning in your own American life, where we excel at overeating and depression, as if gluttony and guilt go hand in hand. Try to have visions of success and acquisition that even an almost enslaved sweatshop worker in Guam could appreciate. Seeds of love, seeds of change, seeds of equality.

If you’re tired of all this big picture prophesy and hyperbole, just equate the Yellow Seed wavespell with spring and its vibrant flowers. You’ll be onto the essence.

Yellow Seed is a crucial wavespell as a counterpoint to the Red Serpent that descended 39 days (three 13-day tours) back. In that time, we squiggled through ten ‘portal’ days, black squares on the Tzolkin calendar that demark higher energy, magic passages that can seem to transcend time and space, gates to the Dreamtime. In Red Serpent we shed a skin that we had outgrown, and the portal column became an uncomfortable revisitation of what confined us, as well as the means to freedom. Yellow Seed is also decorated with ten portals, a seeming mirror image. However, in the theme of Yellow Seed’s duality, darkness and light, the portals here are not the past remembered just as we leave it behind, but a vision of the future we are about to find.

Our seed – a protein-rich microcosm of a full flower – drops in the duration of the portal days through the dark column of earth until it reaches the bottom. Along the way will be soil layers holding the nutrients to empower growth towards bloom. Like Alice’s plunge into the rabbit hole, we will see things on the way, too fast to reach out and touch, that we are sure to rediscover later in magical depth. Part of the portals’ collective teaching is to let go of forcing the future to be now, to come to the bottom of yourself, the base where your root system begins, and from that grounding be assured that you will ultimately be provided all that seems in this moment to be passing you by. We are in the center of a 260-day cycle, plenty of time and promise of growth to go, but we have done the hard work of making space, pressing our fingers in the earth, aerating it with our breath and awareness of an invisible world.

Three qualities describe the Yellow Seed wavespell. Its power is flowering, so that the while the seed itself is a dense nourishment – the basis for all our carbo-loading and vegetarian protein options – the amazing gift and potential is the aroma, color, vitality and seed regeneration of the flower itself. In the days and wavespells of the Yellow Seed, in the people you know who incarnated as one, you feel an unfurling, open arms-mind-heart, an expansiveness and interplay with the sun, the root soil. There is in this time of dropping through the portal days a seed encasement around us, an organic shield, so we will not get hurt in the fall. But all that protection is temporary and countered by the delicacy of the petals we will become, a reminder that in all growth that nourishes we become softer and more succulent at its height.

The action of the Yellow Seed is to target, to find the most promising place, since some seeds don’t rise at all, conditions unfavorable. We may be off target now, about to be rerouted. If you notice in these 13-days you were certain your potential was to be a spaceman, but in the cascade to the bottom of the hole you see circus tents, you will have to retool your intention. Find the support you need to climb back up towards the light. This brightness at the earth’s surface is really spot-lit stage of your unveiled act, your true talent. Look at what you fall through, those pinpricks in the darkness that are previews of the future, for clues of what your calling is, how you call to others, and are called by the gods. Wherever you land will be exactly right, so familiarize yourself with the terrain as you arrive.

The essence of the Yellow Seed is awareness. The sensitivity of a seed percolating in soil is astounding. A flower, too, reacts to sunlight with expansion, to darkness by folding back inward. It sings for morning dew and daily watering. You, embodying the Yellow Seed energy in this time, will have this rush of hypersensitivity, and simplicity. So aware of the elements, you are less able to analyze them, or see even to their sources. You just feel deeply and react, are immersed in their presence, startlingly alert and awake, alive.

Remembering Blue Monkey – Last Wavespell’s Learning

Sometimes the Blue Monkey is a time of hilarity, deepest merriment, but I didn’t observe that this passage. Sometimes, in the metaphor of the monkey itself, it goofs around like a clown, and other times, caged and defensive, hurls its shit at onlookers. We have come up against our confines, the ways we walled ourselves in with our material schwag, and maybe some tantrums and dismay are in order. The Blue Monkey illusion of modern culture – suburban homes, strip malls, teenage self-indulgence in all generations – is melting like a mirage and behind the stage dressing is a true picture of American life: we deeply love and need each other, especially as we navigate our way out of the Sanskrit Maya, the Native American coyote moment of being tricked into believing in Starbucks instead of star systems, in stocks and bonds instead of bold embraces. In good ways we devolved back to primate, primal and playful. Don’t lose that lesson.