Current Wavespell

 

Intelligence – Question – Fearlessness

Yellow Warrior is one of the 20 aspects of our environment celebrated in the Tzolkin (soul count) 260-day calendar.  The glyph image is of a shield used routinely in the Mayan age to defend tribal warriors in their territorial clashes.  The ‘cosmic question mark’ in the center is open to interpretation: it’s the seismic tremor of war in an earthen, bodily world, shaking our foundations; it’s the rising smoke signal of ceremonial preparation for battle; it’s the curiosity we all have, from different vantage points, of the worth of war – War, what is it good for? It’s the question we have to ask ourselves about conflict – personal, global – and our part in it: this is the good work of the Yellow Warrior wavespell.

A modern, liberal-minded supposition is that we could have peace on earth. This is deeply wishful if admirable thinking, only because war has always existed, at least from our current remembering of history. Indeed, there are references to an age when matriarchal society flourished and harmony existed on our planet. There were recently colonized cultures that reflected greater accomplishment of pacifism than those that overlorded them into submission. We all know, too, the place of inner peace we find through meditation, ceremony, journeys into higher – or deeper – consciousness. It feels so good, we want to hold it for all time. And so, too, we would like Planet Earth to be full of billions of people who just get along.

But war, large scale conflict, and the destruction it causes, has its need within our life stream as well as peace. War, or discord, differentiates peace and harmony. We know the easeful calm of serenity and a loving heart as compared with trauma and torment. We recognize the relief of getting along after the passage of an argument. We are spun into conflict, often, without intention or explanation, as if it came through us like fire.  We become a version of thunderbolts and lightning, rain from the sky. Two factions collide like sky falling against earth, and only when the deluge is over do we recognize the purification, the heavy exhalation, the clash brought us.

At its center, the Yellow Warrior wavespell is a time of acceptance of disharmony, incompatibility, disagreement, and even hate. It doesn’t mean that the 13 days will be rife with conflict; not at all. It’s simply a span when such natural displays of human behavior, such human displays of nature, are acceptable and even to be commended. How often do we give ourselves permission to be a ‘bitch’ or an ‘asshole’? How often would we want that permission? It’s so much easier on the body and mind, the open heart, to be kind, compassionate and loving – an ‘angel’ or ‘saint’. But sometimes the negative displays of emotion are just a means to unburden darkness, shake it off to reveal light.  Within the Yellow Warrior time – one of 20 day signs we explore in depth, an archetype within the wheel of life that gets its celebrated moment – we allow the necessary conflicts to arise, transform and ultimately strengthen us into peace.

We all choose our level or flavor of warriorship. Our defense tactics, armoring and weapons of combat (sarcasm, withdrawal, rage, victim’s stance) seem to reflect the frontline action we have already seen in childhood battle zones. There’s our ancestry, traceable to an actual tribal lineage with its particular style of warfare. An important aspect of Yellow Warrior is to honor the way we have learned to fight, and why. We are loyal to our tribe – family of origin, culture, DNA that links us to a certain topography – and we are formed by the practice fights of our clan in order to know how to step up, and stay safe, when attacked on a larger scale.

Feel it in your bones – the most real defense structure we have, all these long, blunt objects protecting the vital organs that are our life force. Feel how you fight, and why. When we punish ourselves for being in conflict – ‘I should have been nicer’ – we miss an opportunity to see what vulnerability we were trying to keep safe. In Yellow Warrior time, we are thrown into sparring, jostling, passionate interfacing, and in the height of battle, chaotic and overheated, unkempt and uncontrolled, we learn what we are fighting for.

Disharmony seeks harmony, so every battle is an attempt at beauty, equality and reconciliation. We fight outwardly when we want the inner conflict to end, when we can’t cordon it off and it explodes violently onto our surroundings. On the national level, we can understand that the U.S.A. is a collective of suppressed feelings – sexual, emotional, negative, aggressive – and so we make routine outbursts to contain cultures that display their ugly moods openly. When the radical Islam movement embodies its rage in self-immolation, suicide bombs to match explosive indignation, we are terrified by such honest displays of frustration. We are afraid of our own violent natures and avoid admissions of aggression in our cultural legacy against African slaves, Native Americans. So we project the fear of our violent tendencies onto others, saying they terror-ize us.

Still, the current global slate of war has to be viewed as perfect, god-driven, one out 20 elements of the Mayan spin. We have 13 days now, the heyday of Yellow Warrior, to see that war is good for something or it would not exist. The question mark of the glyph is again to discover in ourselves the benefit, the irreplaceable value, of war and warriorship. What shows up in this time as conflict is the right fight for you, for the nation or global consciousness, to grow back into peace.

And a word about warriors, the ones who detonate bombs because they were commanded to, whether on a bunker of terrorist insurgents or a schoolhouse. We honor them in this time. We are each warriors, also, on the homefront. We yell at our kids; eventually they yell at us. We scold a less capable driver in an oncoming vehicle. We march back to the mall with clothes that tore on the first wearing and say, ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.’ So we know how to fight, every one of us. The men and women who face mortality, theirs and their enemy’s, every day of their current tours – they are not murderers or devil’s children. They are feeling into our true, ancient history, our masculine veil, our integrity as protectors of women and children, the heart, the home. It’s all scattered in confusion, whether there’s another, better way, but the human beings who are armed, shielded, defended, working in a literal battlefield, are only to be held in our hearts.

If we can honor them, we honor ourselves, can be at peace with our wounds from war as well as the times we have won the battle. Discord is as natural as a wave crashing on the beach and breaking the rocks over eons into sand. Which is easier for our bare feet to cross over?

Jose Arguelles chose three words to describe the Yellow Warrior. Its power is intelligence, which makes me think of the way the Central Intelligence Agency masterminds the war room with its covert operations. A warrior is empowered by stealth, reconnaissance, not always blazing in wielding a sword but skulking around in the bushes for a while to survey the scene. We can use this picture in how we want to solve the conflicts arising for us this wavespell. Can we use our minds to really hone in on our goals, to make our work of restoring peace efficient, relatively painless? What do we need to remember from past conflagrations so we don’t get burned and have to blame others for the fire? It’s especially intelligent to keep as much peace as we can and isolate the cacophony, so the Yellow Warrior time is also about good health and vitality, a clear mind from rest and single-focus, and an integrity about going to the source of the conflict instead of belaboring the fight in the outlying areas, where we could maybe more easily, lazily win. Another intelligence is to accept that winning is an illusion, and the war we need to wage recognizes the courage and convictions of our opponent, as well.

The action of Yellow Warrior is to question. Back to the C.I.A.: remember the bumper sticker slogan, Question Intelligence? There are many ill ways of war and we need to aspire for nobility in battle. In the ancient picture of fighting, the accoutrements were spare – a sword and shield, a bow and arrow – and chivalry, or honoring of the opponent, was paramount. As we stand up for what we believe in we need to second-guess even our own motivation, endlessly, until peace is achieved, minimizing bloodshed, remembering the enemy is also fellow human father/mother, child of god. Don’t let all these references to actual or old fashioned warfare fool you (rather, be intelligent); in the Yellow Warrior time we have something to fight for, someone to fight against, and the question is how to carry reconciliation in our hearts even as we hold our weapons of offense and defense in hand.

The essence of Yellow Warrioris fearlessness. After so much consideration of the ills of warriorship, the actual battle zones, we can step back to the essence of fighting, how we find ourselves there at the axis point of disagreement. It’s because we are for the moment, suddenly or after a long development of courage, unafraid to say or do what we feel. We are unrestricted by manners and morals. We are out of our minds, more raw and organic working with primal instinct of fear – and no fear. If you can’t relate to this wavespell in its honoring of the archetypal male role of lord and protector, at any cost, if you can’t fathom war as ever useful and productive – then just be with the mantra of fearlessness and know it will carry you through risk, vulnerability, as a peaceful warrior, a spiritual one.

Remembering Blue Night –

Last Wavespell’s Learning

The three tiers of Blue Night are dreams, dwellings, and the dubious term, ‘abundance’. We spent 13 days with a rich skyscape of images as we slept, complete with visitations from people alive and dead, as well as the walking dead who we might call our enemies for their inability to communicate with us in daytime. We solved some riddles, resolved some problems, through what poetry came through our night’s rest.

We rediscovered, then, the depth of meaning of ‘home’. Home is where the heart is, so this is also a reference to how our rib cage houses our fragile but essential heart organ, how our body houses our soul. When we are home, in a safe building structured against seismic catastrophe, or through a clear meditation that stills us to our heart center, we are connected to the Dreamtime, day and night. So we recognized simple values, as they arose: I got a good night’s sleep; I have a home to sleep in; I have faith in a world where my soul can be free on a nightly basis, and it counterbalances the confines of this material one.

Abundance is a trigger point; it’s the economy, stupid. We all worry about money, sometimes more than our fare share because there are many who don’t have to worry – yet. The revelation of this particular wavespell was the emerging memory that abundance means feeling so full that we have enough to share. Full of what? We know the answer, now, each of us, because the wavespell worked its magic to make us overflowing. Just notice what, after 13 days, you are now able to give easily away.