You can be a country that was under a dictatorship from the 1930s until the late 1970s and then come out of that, and in 2020 when you have seen the devastation of a global pandemic ravaging humanity, you can make decisions in your country about how to protect your citizens and have that put in place so that nothing like this ever happens again. I’m talking about Spain in April of 2020 creating a plan to offer a base universal salary for every citizen starting this year and continuing on forever. That is my family’s homeland. My grandparents are from the Canary Islands and fled those islands because Franco’s regime would have never honored its citizens in this way back then. A civil war was waged against this kind of humanity. Those, like my grandfather, my Papa Rufino, who believed in taking care of the people over government and church were executed en masse in the late 1930s. And now Spain is a different place in a different time and leading a movement of systemic care that we are not seeing in any capacity in the United States on any systemic level… And because of their citizenship laws, I just need to live there for a year to reinstate citizenship based on my grandparents who had to flee during the darkness of 20th century Europe. Such light shining now. I’m not lying that a move back to the Canaries is not out of the question for my family in the coming years. But for now, I will appreciate the light from afar.
That’s the spirit that every country should be channeling right now but instead you’ve got ignorance and bigotry and, as my 9 year old said when I was talking about this earlier, bullshit. Yep! My 9 year old said that the response by the world governments to this pandemic is “bullshit” because she knows. And she’s the future, y’all, that will come up and be the leaders in a few years. And she knows. Community collective is what is coming and these kids coming up are not going to put up with this ignorance or be a part of a world where this is the norm.
And by the norm I mean the way that countries are handling covid-19… the way governments are handling this especially the United States. I am not talking about the people on the ground, the grassroots efforts. That’s beautiful. You staying home is beautiful. You helping your neighbors so they can stay home is beautiful. You doing what you need to do for your family and friends who are at risk of this killing them is beautiful. More of that as “system”. More of that beauty as “system”. And less of what we’ve got now in the systems. Less of that. Burn that shit to the ground.
Now, I fully acknowledge that Spain, my homeland, the paternal part of my ancestry, is responsible for the desecration and extermination of billions of indigenous people over the history of its existence. I know that sits in the heart of everything we are built on in the United States. I hold the blood and DNA of the Spanish executioners and the Indigenous Guanche people of the Canaries in tandem. And what needs to happen is it all needs to be burned to the ground and we need to start over again. But I look at the collective energy that Spain is offering or that Spain has made the decision to provide for its citizens as a tiny, the tiniest evolution; systemic evolution. And I am not asking for the country to get a pat on the back but i am saying that it’s time for everybody to completely burn down what they thought and what they believed and what they were entrenched in and begin to review the way that we view things. And then begin slowly and incrementally to move toward a collective community lens that lifts everyone up. And that is not any system that is in our nation, that is not any institution in our nation. Nor is it any system or institution globally.
So… If you know me and you know my ferocity, you will know that I have been preaching revolutionary flames for nearly 2 decades. I’ve been calling forth a global cycle of burning, cleansing, and a rising from the ashes anew, Phoenix style, for a lot of that time especially since my own personal Phoenix cycle saved me. And this little virus that is invading everybody’s systems, invading everybody’s systems, invading everybody’s systems, all of the systems here inside us but also everywhere within which we are ensnared is a tap, a nudge, a check in. This is the beginning of the unraveling. And get right with the liberation. Because it’s coming and it’s overwhelming and the best thing that will happen to you.
Now is the time to think through what stage of grief you are in because we are all in different stages of grief. Even those of us that have been waiting for something major like this are still adjusting. Now my adjustment may not be as tumultuous and wave making as your adjustment. But I’ve been doing a lot of work on finding the balance in that wave for many many years. I have posted here below a graphic on the stages of grief for your review. Because what are you doing? What are you doing with your time right now? In this never before moment where you are being required to be home and slow down. So take a couple of minutes and sit with that. When you wake up tomorrow and you have the little bit of extra time because you don’t have your day filled to the brim with all the things that you used to have it filled to the brim with so that you would not have to think about how broken and how dysfunctional everything in every part of your life has been because we are living out of sync with, like everything, everything that we are made of. Take some time with it. Drink a cup of coffee and look over this graphic or reflect on it with a glass of bourbon tonight… Where are you in this shift? How far have you come and into and out of what are you moving?
If you are not drinking alcohol in this time, grab a big glass of water. Water is a healing elixir to nourish that body that is riding these waves of grief. We are all made of water. And you know, if you watched Frozen 2, water has memory. I mean that is not the only place where that information is available. Olaf is probably getting that message to a larger audience than the scientists who have been doing research with water, memory, and the water cycle and how literally the water we are taking in right now is the same water that our ancestors drank because water doesn’t ever leave our planet. it just keeps recycling itself over and over again. And we are made of that. We hold all of that. We hold the memories. We hold everything. And deep down, we already knew that without Olaf, scientists, our doctor, trainer, or holistic healer reminding us to stay hydrated after any intense mental, physical, or spiritual session. We know it.
We hold the memory of what humanity was before it was corrupted into the capitalistic, bullshit, jumping through hoops society that we are today. We also hold all of the gross stuff too. But it is a balance. We have to just find the balance. The shadow is just as important as the light. We have to go through the shadow. We’re in a shadow time. This is a fucked up time and honestly it has been for decades, centuries, millenia. But specifically right now in this paradigm where we can see ourselves mirrored in every human on earth morning noon and night through technology. It offers us to SEE. Because the shadow shines a light really clearly. The light becomes really clear when you are in shadowy times. And so now we are going to figure out where we are in our grieving process. Move through the grief. And then be ready for a new paradigm. And work toward it and fight for it. Woah. Look, I’m so indoctrinated into the vocabulary of the old systems that I said work and fight… Rather than “work”, I want you to spend time with the shift, acknowledge it, take it in, and let the change become who you are. And instead of “fighting”, heal yourself so that you are in a space where you will not accept anything less than “systems of care.”
And then let’s go. Let’s GO! Let’s create, co-create, in a new energy, in a new collective energy… It’s not new. It is in a collective energy that we all remember and will not allow ourselves to forget again. In that Spirit then we can co-create and be the generations that offer that energy, drop into that energy, and hold the door open for our descendants now and for many generations as we all move into that co-creation of collective systems of energetic care.
I just finished The Labyrinth of the Spirits by Carlos Ruiz Zafón and it is a masterful culmination of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books series which I have been reading since the first novel, Shadow of the Wind, was translated to English in 2004. 15 years with this series.
I’ve been thinking…