The passage of time

This week’s horoscopes are coming out under the light of a void-of-course Aquarius Moon that will remain in that state until it enters Pisces at 10:41 a.m. on Monday, Dec. 30. These are such interesting times. With the New Year just around the corner, I got to thinking about a lot of things, so, like it or not the intro will be a little different this week.

The words that follow come from an email exchange with a dear friend. What started out as a Christmas greeting turned into a little essay on the passage of time, and how things roll at the end of the day. Why did I make it the jumping off place for this intro? Because what we call the new year  is all about the passage of time. It is a portal that marks the end of one cycle and the beginning of another. If you aren’t in the mood for this, no problem: feel free to skip on ahead to your weekly predictions. If you are patient enough to put up with me and my musings, here goes:

Dear, dear friend,

I too feel something like sadness this year, not for the same reasons you do. It’s easier for me to be philosophical because, unlike you, the year hasn’t been marked by so much death and dying. Even so, with an awareness of my own mortality becoming more of a reality, everything that has happened in the last 72 years fades in the face of what we were too young, and too busy to see coming. I look around and say to myself, “Whew; no one told us about this; even if they did, it would have gone in one ear and out the other.”

Over time what we call life turns into something totally unlike anything we have been led to believe. People appear to go downhill as they age because the life force starts to dwindle at a time when it takes more of it to keep going. There is nothing during our younger years that teaches us how to call that energy up from within. No one tells us that once you pass 60, you can do more with less, so we fall prey to the belief that we’re getting old, and that’s just the way it is and this thought-form becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Aside from that, anyone who might have tapped in to the elder mysteries isn’t around to tell us how to handle the things that occur between 60 and 100. And if they’re alive, they’re invisible to us because no one notices, or listens to, old people.

Yesterday I watched an old man struggle to get from his car to the post office. He was bent and twisted. It took everything he had to move. He was 100% focused on each step. I tried to imagine what it must have taken for him to put his clothes on, get in the car and make it downtown. And then it hit me; this broken down old man was actually a treasure chest of experience and wisdom, full of understanding that no one will ever know about because the entire culture is youth-anized to only want to listen to and give credence to the young.

I felt a huge affinity for that old guy. I sat there wondering how he felt inside – because even though I too, am tired, and broken, and in need of repair, I feel like a pioneer in a realm that is totally new to me. I see light on the other side of whatever it takes to heal the ravages of time and all the pain that life deposits in the cellular memory. It would be great if people knew that what’s left to heal in us, at the end of the day, is what we need to focus on. If we can bring ourselves to conduct that special form of internal ‘archaeology’ the portal that takes us from 72 to the wide open spaces that expand from there onward, leads us into a realm where everything we always longed for becomes the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Now I know what is meant by the words that are written in the last lines of the ‘Charge of the Goddess’ –

“And thou who thinkest to seek for me,

Know that thy seeking and yearning shall avail thee not,

Unless thou knowest the Mystery;

That if that which thou seekest thou findest not within thee,

Thou will never find it without –

For behold, I have been with thee from the Beginning,

And I am that which is attained at the end of desire”

What is ‘The end of desire”? Think about that. Is it the point at which we begin to see that absolutely everything comes from within? It’s one thing to know this and quite another to embody it. In New Age circles, the expression, “I am a spiritual being having a human experience” gets tossed around all the time. I thought I knew what that meant until I bumped into a couple of 100-year-old Navajo women. It was they who told me that no one has the capacity to own those words, or the truth about life and themselves until they reach the age of 72.

This blew me away and got me thinking; why 72 years? Why does it take that long? Then, boom, it hit me. The Precession Cycle is approximately 25,000 years long. It takes the Earth 72 years to move through one degree of that cycle. Hermetic Law tells us, “as above, so below.” This law is axiomatic in the third dimension. Thus, in the life of any human, it takes 72 years to begin to hold space for the understanding that would allow us to embody the truth about who we really are, and what we are here for, relative to the greater whole.

If this comes as a surprise, it will be even more of a surprise for you to hear that the Navajo grandmothers also told me, “It really doesn’t even begin to get good until you turn 85!” Who knew? According to them, if you get that far with your integrity and your body/mind/spirit intact, the higher spiritual centers awaken naturally.

This must be what they mean when they say “Time is the Mother of Truth.” And now that we’re here, on the Eve of the celebration that reminds us how time marches on, it might be a good idea to look at where we are on the path. At this point it would help for our vision to be 20/20. How clearly do we see things at this point in time?

I don’t know about you but I feel like one of those guys in the movie, “The Great Escape,”  in the part where they make it through the tunnel and pop their heads up out of the ground on the other side of the prison wall. I am older and wiser and so happy to be alive. What’s next? Who knows? I am pretty sure we never stop learning, and growing, and getting closer and closer to the Source. This is my New Year’s prayer – that all of us are about to be reborn, emerging from the past with 20/20 vision, 100% in touch with the truth, and purified by whatever it took for us to make it this far.

Let me leave you with that, wish you a Happy New Year, and invite you to take what you can from this week’s ‘scopes.