Eclectic Muddlehood

As I begin tonight’s post, I have no title in mind as of yet.  Basically this is because I don’t really know where this particular post is going.  All I know is that I really, really wanted to blog tonight.  The past three nights, I’ve had a significant problem getting to sleep.  I’ve been seriously plagued but what fellow spiritual truth seekers might recognize as the monkey mind that chatters on endlessly at you, evading every possible attempt at controlling it (or at least slowing it down just a little.)

I feel the energy around and within me shifting majorly.  From my personal energy to the energy of the Earth itself, things are massively in flux.  I have watched from the safety of my American home, the natural destruction that ran rampant across the globe these past few weeks.  Big earthquake in China, little earthquake in Washington, DC even.  Cyclone in Burma.  Tornados in the United States.  Thousands upon thousands of lives ended suddenly.  Patris Maximus says the Earth is purging herself.  He views humans, Matrix-style, as little more than a virus these days and he says Mother Earth’s immune system is simply fighting back.  I have more hope for our species than that, but Gaia’s energy is surely churning big time and I don’t need evening newscasts filled with footage of the devastation to know it.  Our family energy is shifting also, but so far thankfully, without the accompanying destruction.  Patris Maximus is settling into his new and better job with a new and better company.  We are looking forward to a most financially secure future.  And to a future where our dreams of overseas family travel are much more achievable.  We may even find ourselves walking the expat path in Australia a year or so from now which is equally exciting and intimidating.  The Triad of Chaos is undergoing many developments themselves.  Athena continues to push the academic envelop, but we seem to be in a period of marked acceleration that I have noticed is almost cyclical base on the seasons with her.  Artemis recently took two days to give up diapers completely and even though they are still about six weeks away from the two year old mark seems suddenly much older to me as she walks about speaking in paragraphs and wearing big girl underwear.  And my sweet Apollo.  His favorite phrase has recently become Check it out, mama!  He radiates so much pride in his daily accomplishments, it practically makes my heart burst. 

Recently, I have been absorbing a great deal of information about evolution.  I have been learning about how dynamic the process seems to be and how elegant.  How all life is locked in this amazing dance with the planet, following the rise and fall of periods of relative stasis and little evolutionary growth, followed by mass extinction events triggered by dramatic changes in the planetary ecology and sudden, necessary and brilliant leaps in evolutionary development to regain the stasis of old in the environment of the new.  This pattern has struck a deep spiritual chord within me.  I do not need the fossil record or geological data to know that this indeed is the truth of life.  I can see it and feel it within me and within my own lifetime on a much smaller scale.  This is the pattern my own development has taking over this first third of my life.  Periods of little growth in any aspect of my life are followed by periods of massive upheaval which precipitate massive personal evolution.  As best I can tell, the last period of upheaval has recently ended with Patris Maximus securing his new career.  So the major shifting of energies within me is the personal evolution in motion.  This is a new type of experience for me this time though because I am aware of the pattern suddenly.  So the viewpoint is different.  How the evolution is manifesting is different.  I like it.  I like the consciousness of it.  I see countless paths before me and can sense the incredible potential of each one.  I like the feeling of controlling the creation process a bit more than usual and actually analyzing the paths one by one before stepping out.  However, the energy is highly intoxicating, hence the monkey mid and the trouble settling to sleep.

Athena and I recently finished listening to a fantastic unabridged English translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh which I actually remember reading in high school.  She loved it and wants to know if we can renew it from the library and listen to it again.  I am delighted to do so, since I was appalled to realize that the version I was fed in high school was highly sanitized and barely the same story.   I am also struck by the universality of the themes of the poem.  Here is the first story.  Ever.  Or at least the earliest story published that modern humans have been able to locate and translate so far.  And it is still, some seven thousand years later, highly relevant to the human condition.  The hero’s journey, the longing for lasting friendships, the brotherhood of warriors, the grief of loss, the fear of death and what follows, the loss of innocence, the trade off of innocence for knowledge, the journey to becoming fully human.  These are still themes present all around us today in everything from books, and movies to politics and religion.  Our struggle with the human condition and our basic mythology has not changed for over seven millennia.  I am not sure whether that comforts or depresses me.  I was also surprised to discover how much of the early Judeo-Christian scriptures are Sumerian mythology rewritten.  I did not recall the entire telling of a global deluge in the Epic of Gilgamesh the last time I was exposed to it, but there it was with its subtle differences from the Noarchian version, but the same myth none the less.  A pantheon of gods and goddesses instead of just one decide to punish humanity.  The fowl that finally finds land after the rains is a raven instead of a dove.  But the basic story is the same.  A friend in the film and television industry tells me jokingly that there are only really a handful of original movie plotlines and every movie ever made falls into one of those basic archetypes.  I guess that is more of an eternal, universal truth than either she or I realized. 

So after all of this evolution, many things remain the same.  They take on different forms but their essence remains constant and unwavering.  There is hope in that, I think.  And despair.  But if I may be permitted a cheesy philosophical moment, that is the true nature of this life experience.  Balancing the dichotomies of our existence, blending the familiar with the new and walking the paths of our ancestors while simultaneously forging a path of our own.  And that is where my monkey mind has led me this breezy Texas night.  To the edge of the next path.