Fireflies, a musical accompaniment for this blog, written by Adam R. Young, and performed by Owl City.
I have dithered for many years (and then some more) about whether I should publish this blog, or any for that matter. It has been stored away for years. A few edits and otherwise nothing much has changed. After a prompt from YouTube (see Fireflies above) and my seeing that it had 602M views, a WOW number, I then noticed that it was put online on 15 December 2009. Synchronicity has been a good friend throughout my long life, and while all I say and write is born of my thinking, I also accept fully that I may get things wrong sometimes, but never intentionally. Either way it is time to find my fingers again. I am now going to hit publish.
On 13 December 2019, I posted a photo of a sunset on Facebook. It was a sunset that knocked the breath out of my lungs and filled me with a foreboding sense that the world was on fire. Well, you could say I wasn’t far wrong. The next morning a year-old memory revealed that I had posted a similar photo on FB on the same day last year, 13 December 2018. Little did I know then of what lay ahead for me and my family. My beautiful, kind Mad Hatter of a brother, who self-identified with what was good and truthful in the world, which included Jesus and Shiva, shortly into January 2019 entered an eight-month period of an existential crisis that revolved around good and evil and how he could not continue to live unless he recovered his ‘beautiful life’ that now lay in tatters at his feet. It is all he spoke of to me and a few others throughout a deeply painful time for him that manifested in his body as well as his mind. I believe he had an experience in which he saw the past and the future, a part of which we all are. August 15th 2019 he gave up his inner battle.
We, all people living today, are in the midst of a societal and equally an environmental existential crisis, or as I see it, that great ever-present battle between Good and Evil—as above so below. This feels clear to me, and thoughts of Greg never follow far behind. We have ‘killed God’ and Nietzsche’s words, The Parable of the Madman, ring loud and clear all around us. Without our God, the same one no matter which religion or Religion , our souls feel isolated and are starved of love as we struggle to find them within.
Today we slide at breakneck speed down a muddy mountain slope as we edge closer to the evils as illustrated by great literature like George Orwell’s 1984 and Margaret Attwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale—how evil can be hidden within a political movement disguised in the clothes of concern and supported by smoke and mirrors. It is sad-making as it is not because people in the main are not good and kind, but rather we have given our trust to the kings, leaders and governments believing that they know how to do the job and have our best interests at heart. There may have been a few good ones in the past, but now that ‘God is away’ what is to stop the rats from coming out to play. Power, wealth and secrecy are an intoxicating mix and the game being played is too easy. It offers riches and power to the few while we, the spinners of straw into gold, are being seen as the thorn that pierces their rosy world.
Will the much talked about awakening of our souls happen in time to save us all from unthinkable atrocities and a devastated landscape? It can because it has always been there waiting for us to become more conscious. Now is the moment to find the courage that lies somewhere behind our backbone, as we stare back down the long dark path of our past. I can just make out a stand of trees filled with twinkling lights of fireflies. “Don’t forget us, turn to face the future,” I hear them say, “Even with your last breath redemption is to hand.”
Do you know that fireflies spend most of their lifecycle as a ‘glow-in-the-dark’ grub in the soil? They feed, rest and grow, trusting always that following a true miracle one day their moment to light up our world will come. Let’s make our incarnation this time round a good one. Let it draw us to the light that reveals the All. One for all, all for one.* We may well find there is a very different way of being who we always had the potential to be.
*Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers. Unus pro omnibus, omnes pro uno. The unofficial motto of Switzerland, and also the motto of the virtually real town in the Truman Show and.
jennie's red book 