All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.
Poppies and Popcorn above Big Creek
POPPIES
Words and Music by Jim Robbins
Together we have waded through fire,
the heatless flame altering color
slightly at each step and each hour
of the season, the hues of goldfields,
lupine, fivespot, baby blue eyes, and owl's clover
mingling with these poppies
that burn time away
so that an instant or an age
is of no importance, and moving
or standing still, we
are like them,
burning quietly.
Several spiritual people I know predicted that a powerful shift in human consciousness would begin in 2019 and that eventually everything would become clear. I took what they said with a grain of salt until Covid struck at the end of 2019. Much has indeed become clear: the mind nowadays can easily paint a bleak picture of our current circumstances. Powerful authoritarian forces have all but captured our political and economic systems, and organized resistance seems futile. When I was a young activist, the people I worked with seemed certain that as a species we had enough time to enact gradual reforms that would eventually create sustainable communities in balance with nature. Capitalism around the globe, however, has remained an unstoppable force, relentlessly commodifying and exploiting and exhausting natural resources while global climate disruption worsens dramatically.
The handful of people who have more wealth than half of humanity have managed to control most of the world's politicians and consequently avoid paying the taxes that might have curtailed some of our most serious problems. For instance, here in the US, rational measures, such as constant testing and quarantining and in-home care and necessary lockdowns would have greatly limited the horrific death toll in the US.
Instead, we experienced a massive failure of the government and the for-profit health care industry, a failure that has contributed greatly to the economic crisis, and now we are told that we must learn to “live with it.” In other words, since business interests don't want to decrease their profits by partially shutting down the economy, and since our "representative" government is unable to find sufficient resources, in other words, to tax the rich enough to take care of public needs, such as proper planning and implementation of preventive and protective measures--as a society we are told we should just let the pandemic rage as the virus continues to mutate. All the while, the wealthy elite who control prices continue to gouge us in every conceivable way during what is turning out to be arguably the worst health and economic and moral crisis this country has ever experienced.
If I were a slightly more paranoid version of George Orwell, I would say that the super-rich cabal running the world decided a while back to implement a shock and awe strategy that undermines organized society through mass death and scarcity and poverty and homelessness and rampant inflation in order for them to establish authoritarian rule. Putin, a super-rich dictator, allows his terrorist army to target civilians, killing and starving women and children and the elderly, but the death toll from war in Ukraine will probably never reach the death toll from Covid in the US (over a million dead and still climbing). By stating that he will use nuclear weapons, Putin is also terrorizing the rest of the world. Through demoralization and uncertainty and fear, the super-rich elites who are our true rulers are laying the groundwork for totalitarian control, through the intentional paralysis of government in the United States and the military practices of the Russian army in the Ukraine, for example.
Poppies above Reservoir
During my spiritual awakening I freed myself of negativity and connected with powerful forces of harmony at a time when I was terribly ill. I finally recognized what I needed to do to save myself only during moments of extreme crisis, in other words. I was also fortunate to find people who could help restore me on a spiritual level, such as a healer who eliminated the negative energy from my aura and replaced it with heavenly chi, the powerful life-force energy. I initially went to her because black energy continued showing up in my heart even after I had released it from my energy field every day for weeks. After a couple of Reiki sessions, the black energy disappeared completely, which was a huge relief since I was in my mid-fifties and my father had died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-five.
On the Tree of Life, the vice, or unbalanced energy, in the fourth Emanation known as Mercy (“Chesed” in Hebrew), manifests as tyranny, hypocrisy, gluttony, and bigotry, all of which can be seen to a greater or lesser degree in both Putin and Trump (who famously claimed that Putin is a genius). Many of the world’s problems stem from these negative qualities in our leaders even as we collectively, on a global scale, are reaching a point of extreme crisis. We can, nevertheless, eliminate negativity and heal and elevate ourselves spiritually, on our own and also with the help of effective healers. We must also insist that our leaders manifest the positive energies associated with the Tree of Life, which in this case includes compassion for all life and the recognition of the magnificence, abundance, and harmony of the human spirit and the planet. We must act with great care and discipline individually and collectively, healing and elevating human consciousness in this time of great crisis while keeping greedy, gluttonous, tyrannical, hypocritical, bigoted, venal predators from positions of power.
I could go on and on, like many political commentators, showing how profit remains the bottom line for the elites even while, through their political and economic influence, they continue to destroy the planet and millions of lives with impunity. Individually we currently might not have much power over what the elites do to people and the world, but we do have domain of our own inner life. If each of us establishes inner harmony, the external world around us becomes more balanced and harmonious, free of unnecessary drama. If so inclined, we can work with the spiritual powers that heal and cleanse and fill us with divine love and harmony as well. My friend is right when she says that those energies know what to do to heal us—and if we focus on channeling positive spiritual energies, we are far less likely to give in to tyranny because of fear or a sense of powerlessness.
A healer once told me that nature is going to save us. When I look back on what led up to the crisis in my life, I realize that nature has healed me many times. The sense of timelessness that I feel in nature has always helped me to transcend personal problems and gives me a greater perspective on human life in general. There is something about poppies blanketing a hillside, for instance, that makes you feel significant as a spiritual being connected to the glory of the cosmos, but insignificant as a human. Stepping carefully through the fire of poppies, you always become more alert to all of the other flowers within the conflagration: the lupine and goldfields and owl’s clover and popcorn. All creatures burning in this fire are as magnificent and mysterious as any other, and it doesn’t matter if you have known them for a few minutes or for thirty years. Even an age is no longer of importance because the spirit within all of them is timeless, and you are grateful that you could spend even a few moments in the heatless flame.
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