Update, one hour later: Wowowow! I completely spaced the most important part of this post, and that’s because it felt other-dimensional, this: In the middle of the night, during my usual involuntary two-hour surf of collective unconscious gunk (see below), I heard, quite distinctly, as if just outside my window, the unhurried sound of a bell, three times in a row. That’s all. Just three times. As if, I would say now, to signify, “All will be well.”

Sorry folks, can’t help but use Carl Jung’s biography as my title here. He would probably approve. Who was it that said, “Great men steal, lesser men borrow.” Karl Marx? I’m definitely “lesser,” and not because I’m not a man but a woman, but because I’m on the internet, where borrowing and stealing begin to merge to the point where “intellectual property” dissolves into the continuum. YES!

Well, geez, it already feels as if we’re in the aftermath of this epic Grand Cross week. And in a way, we are! The ping-ping-ping exact square/opposition/conjunction biggies linking Mars/Uranus/Pluto/Jupiter are about over. But of course, the week’s not over, not by a long shot.

This morning, after another night of wrestling with the collective unconscious between two and four A.M. — I’m getting much better at remaining present while surfing the tumultuous rolling waves of grief, fear, dread, anger, etc. ad nauseum. It does remind me of the Grand Canyon, riding the Colorado River way back in the spring of 1990, three weeks down a roiling snake, lower chakras fully engaged, deeper and deeper into the Mother, the canyon walls morphing into gigantic stone faces — and this, without marijuana or LSD or anything else! No need for extra stimuli, shall we say, sitting on inflated rubber rolling over the boiling greenish brown swells and deceptively calm eddies, and always on the lookout, no, “hearout” for the next subtle background sound of swishing, SWISHING, gradually increasing to a roaring crescendo as we round a bend for the next gigantic fall through endless churning white water. Back then, I’d just repeat this mantra, over and over again, while sitting serenely in the middle of the raft as others paddled through the falls: grace and balance, grace and balance, grace and balance.

That’s pretty much what I feel now. Grace and balance again required as we negotiate our way down a roiling river of the present moment as it spins us all into either oblivion or transcendance or a bit of both.

Meanwhile, just to slow things down, let’s go back, waaaay back, to yesterday afternoon. After a great morning walk with zero chemtrails above (amazing how blue the sky really can be without the haze, eh?), I walked out onto my patio to begin my late afternoon prostrations (chi kung, tai chi), and happened to look up.

I should not have done that. Well, maybe I should have. Grace and balance required here too, to counter the roiling anger, frustration, FURY that I always feel when bombarded. Which is mostly every day. So yep, FURY every day. Not just that it’s happening, but that most people still remain so ignorant of it. It reminds me of 9/11. One of those “truths” which, once we grasp it, our world-view shatters. No more business as usual.

But what does that knowledge of global perfidy really mean in the short term or long term or however you want to parse time? Well, for me, it means continuing to work here, locally, on the small, the very small: the urban farmstead that we’re gradually bringing into manifestation at these two next-door homes, plus the GANG garden, plus, bigger, the GANE ecovillage. Gradually. Yeah, like r-e-a-l slow. Like sludging through mud. The mud of expectations and regrets and memories of all the other experiments that I have tried (and failed?) in this storied life. Actually, not failed, just learned from. So many! And most of them have/had to do with rebuilding community, real security, either on the ground or in the form of alternative magazines (one of them, “OpenSpace,” back in the 1970s, a three year experiment in my home town Twin Falls, Idaho; another, Crone Chronicles, a national niche quarterly, 12 year experiment) or other, like this exopermaculture blog.

So, yesterday afternoon, next door neighbor Rebecca (the real gardener here) tasked me with transplanting blackberry bushes. Which I did! Fourteen of ’em! And she’s right, I do feel stronger day by day when I continue to do something very physical every afternoon. If I, at 71, can say this, so can YOU.

Back to the now legendary Grand Cross. What I’ve been meditating on mostly, is how it intersects with the U.S. Chart, which has its Sun, in Cancer, exactly at that same 13° point that Jupiter occupies now! Which means it’s being fired by Mars, Uranus and Pluto! Aaaah! Not only that, but the U.S. Saturn is square the Sun, in Libra, which means that the transiting Mars is on Saturn, and in sum BOTH Saturn and Sun in the U.S. chart are being hammered.

Shall we say that the best laid plans (Sun/Saturn) are going awry? The plans for Ukraine. The plans for Syria. The mostly secret, and definitely diabolical, egocentric, arrogant plans for all those other pieces of Mother Earth that this bloated, bloviating Empire lays claim to?

Check out RT.com, Press.tv., jhaines6., etc. etc., for gobs of headlines that suggest just that.

Oh, and BTW: that avalanche on Everest? So glad that one blogger has now given that tragedy exactly the perspective it deserves. I suggest we view the top of Everest as a metaphor for the tip-top of the capitalist agenda, how the .0001% gets to the top on the laboring, backs of serfs, and how the serfs are now, thank the Mother Earth goddess herself, in revolt.

Climbing Everest is the peak of hubris

Interesting, in this context, also, that two academic reports (one an article, the other a book) are now calling capitalism itself into question.

Oh yeah, and one more, this hilarious response to the Bundy drama:

I just never fail to be amazed at the resilience of the human spirit, shown especially in humor. So grateful!