Time of the Blooming Ashes

I came to call this time The Time of the Blooming Ashes. I feel these words from the future, an old man sitting around the fire; and I say this from the present moment.

I am there then, and here now, as the question comes to ask about the end of the world as we knew it.

How did the world end? What really happened?

I respond the best I can.
And the truth is: I don’t know how to best remember a time that unfolded as a creative act to forget itself...

The world was ending for a long time.
We had Justice and names for other systems.
A reality that often revolved around right and wrong.
There was always the Right, and always the Wrong.

But there was also something in between the two notes.
There was a third member—a third note—between the you and I, us and them, right and wrong, this and that.

We forgot about the third note a long time ago.
Some would call this the Soul.

This third was coming back around so it could never leave again.
From this would arise the fourth note.
The one happening all along.
The music where everything and nothing and everything in between simply knows itself as the very music we stopped being able to hear for so long.
I used to think I wanted silence, but what I really wanted was the silence that comes from the music knowing itself as music again.

This is the sound we now know very well,
You would not believe what it took to get there.

The story of who we really are was playing a trick on us because, for such a long time, we became a species who learned to hurt ourselves and hurt other members of the ecosystem,
and we were suppose to learn from that hurt, but our hurt became greater than our ability to learn from it.

So after a while we could no longer see what we were doing to ourselves.

And once we started to see what we were doing
once we started to see what we had become,
then that third note between the two
the soul
started to appear again
like a distant planet
that one day stares back at us
from the furthest point
because we were finally ready
to know how close it had always been.

We had times of war on this planet, but this was a different kind of war. This war had been going on the whole time and, simply by becoming someone, any individual possessed the right to try and escape this war. And to some degree, they could.

Imagine a castle put on top of this world, designed through a grand kind of architecture, crafted by a committee who makes the blueprint. Everyone who enters this grand design eventually becomes aware of this hidden foundation they were always living within, whether they wanted to become aware or not.

The magic trick of how the whole culture started to become aware of itself happened only on the way to its ending. A trick crafted from the evolutionary arrow of Love itself—coming only from and to the direction of the unknown—is inherently designed to blur the lines between the poison and the antidote.

A collapse of the economic system may shake one’s livelihood, but forces the confrontation of what actually has been driving the livelihood all along.

A fear of the public invasion of personal privacy pulls the rug out from our well-constructed boundaries, but forces the singular bridge to resume its gravity between personal, collective, and planetary.

A sense of tyranny ignites the fight of everyone’s identity to declare the right to be who they are, how they feel and what they think , but reveals a self-soothing symphony of individuality that has no endgame in destroying the ecosystem of the whole, patiently longing for its individual notes of diversity to know themselves as that very whole they seek to dominate.

People began to take sides, to fight more than they’d ever fought before.
The war that was happening all along started to reveal all at once, but because its revealing had been ripe and waiting for such a long, long time.
The present moment of every polarity, every expression of the sacred, every declaration of one truth then the other…

Reality started to fold back on itself.

And as every battle on the outside led us to be so sure
of what we are not on the inside, the cells of a dying civilization were forced to reconcile the very blueprint of that grand design we’d been living in.

We looked at artificial intelligence and the advances of technology, never knowing if what we were seeing outside of ourselves was even real anymore.
And the reality outside of ourselves started back at us,
wondering the same thing.

The magic trick started to take shape—no longer as the allure and glamour of waiting to see what would happen on the stage in front of us, but as a creative act we started to feel from the inside out.

It was then we started to feel the first wave of the song that’s wrapped inside of what we call Grief.

We started to realize how long we learned to look outside ourselves.
How long ago we learned that our dreaming of salvation, and our ancient need to control and organize the world around us, were often the very same thing.
We thought we knew what Power was. But we did not.

The right to our own Divinity—to remember who we truly are—was rumbling behind every opinion, debate, ideology and battle.
But the magic did not come from the result of the battle.

It came from the heartbreak of being forced to confront how responsible we've become for our own separateness.

The Time of the Blooming Ashes did not let us truly know the blooming until we were ready to be naked amongst the ashes.

A civilization naked in a sea of its own ashes became the best reflection we could have asked for to finally look back to the stars.

We thought the darkness that was rising was the kind we were misled about in myths and stories as something to be feared.
But it was in the moments surrounded by thousands and thousands of people on the streets, in the forests, in town squares,
covered in the abundances of ashes,
that we finally learned to accept who we were,
what we had become
and where we were now willing to go.

We could finally let the dark between the stars reach us,
lay down all knowing,
look to the rocks and roots of this planet
this body
our home.