A Shadow Story
Facing our fears at the time of Coronavirus.
An awakening comes to the world. It comes in the form of a sickness manifest on a microcosmic level. A dark shadow had been haunting the people. Every day growing stronger. The shadow is within, we have to face it. It is drawing us into unconsciousness, taking us to a place of uncertainty. It amplifies the fear of death and the fear of lack we had been running from all our lives. It echoes in an empty cavern. The empty place of disconnection with spirit, when we fall into doubt. For centuries, humans have habitually, unconsciously and obsessively attempted to fill that chasmic hole. Ever since we began to believe the rheteric that we are seperate from nature. The empty place of spirit is the place where the heart should be. This is the centre we should be working from, but the machine that runs the world has not worked from a place of heart. The economy that drives the daily grind comes from a heartless place of lack and it creates more emptiness than satisfaction.
We have tried filling the hole with material things, with stuff, with booze, with smoke, with fake and fantasy fluff. Never to be saturated, never satisfied, because no matter how much we had, we could not buy enough.
That shadow mutated. It has gone viral, the shadow of something un-containable escaped, like in the story of Pandaora’s box. It came out of the drive to fill an empty space, the fear of lack that caused people to lose integrity. To become false. The shadow came out of the box, which somebody had the arrogance and audacity to open. There are certain boundaries we knew we should never cross. There are ancient alchemical laws, deep Earth laws, which had been forgotten in the madness of the shadow of addiction, with no respect for the whole. The addiction had taken every form and every Sickness. The true pandemic has been an addiction for a long time. (Addiction to Power, money, shopping, tobacco, alcohol, coffee, sugar, self-harm, sex, social media, co-dependency, power and victimhood, all that and more, more, more.)
The fire of our driving addictions grew to a bonfire of major proportions. It set the forests alight to clear the trees for cattle to graze, in order to feed the fat fast-food eaters. It cut down the trees for palm sugar for candy bars and biscuits. It poisoned the soil for more perfect crops for our fake cereal boxes, for bread and for maize to feed the factory-farmed animals, who are treated worse than prisoners of war.
This driving desire makes war on nature. It destroyed eco-systems, it wastes tons of wild ocean animals who don’t fit into frozen fun-food packages. Worst of all it has poisoned the sacred water wells with poison dust from mines and oil and gas, extracted by gang-raping the earth on a massive scale. The bigger your cup the more you take.
Addictions are the shadows that grow as they are denied. They stay in the shadow- in the subconscious realm, hidden unless we face and confront them. For a long time addiction has ruled the world from the top to the bottom and held on tight, like a demon prepared to fight.
As the people of the world, we have been living with this madness. We have seen it all, from the shiny golden towers of the North to the cruel battles in the jungles of Africa. From the wars in the deserts, the pirate poacher ships on the shiny seas to the squalid gang wars in lost wetlands — the ghetto’s on the flats of the fairest Cape. We have seen what this mad addiction does. We watched as it destroyed families, bodies, livelihoods. How children suffered and the innocent animals too, and still the addictions have burned, like a fire in the forrest. We knew, we knew, but we turned away, there was too much todo, and still, it burned.
Deep in the darkness, the shadow mutated and then it broke out into the world. It happened one humid day in a market in Wuhan city, when somebody sold one of the very last Pangolins of the desperately endangered species to a very ambitious chef. (The fact that it was the last of a rare species, meant that the seller earned a huge profit for the poor little scaly creature- so far from home in his miserable cage.) The Pangolin looked so sad, isolated and a little sick after it’s cruel capture in Africa and his awful journey to that wicked market.
The chef did his best with the tough exotic meat. He dressed it up to look quite stylish and the final dish was served with aplomb. As the extravagant customer took lifted his fork to take his first bite, el Corona jumped the species gap. A mutation metabolized and released. Like a wild animal from the zoo. They tried to contain it. They did their best. But it’s an invisible ghost with the power to move very quickly through the population of every country. So they contained the people instead, as an attempt to control the uncontrollable.
The world came to a stand-still. The traffic stopped. Everyone went home to be alone. To face their demons. To face the real place of lack. We could run forever, but we couldn’t hide. We had to take that ride.
Mother nature had spoken. We had our wake-up call.
We are ordered to stay home. So... Go deep inside.
Listen to the quieter sounds. Begin to see the true colours.
Become aware of the subtleties moving inside our bodies.
Tune in. Learn to breathe again. Learn to eat for health. Learn to love.
Learn to see. That’s you. This is me. The scales fall from our eyes.
We are alone and we are all connected intrinsically.
Alone and in community, interdependently.
We are part of the world. Threaded into the web.
We are awakening as we become aware what we touch.
Yet, as we wash our hands, a thousand times, we cannot wash them clean.
We must all be in integrity, or we endanger our community.
We must face this darkness.
Feel it and ask it what it is.
Listen.
Find the edges, find clarity, clear the way.
Allow flow and breathe. Do the fire-walk-
stepping lightly over the coals- keeping an eye on the goal:
trust yourself- believe.
Balance from the core.
Let go of what you don’t need.
Don’t waste — share kindly.
Find the medicine to move it, into a new framework.
Inside the cocoon, we have to let go of all we know.
No need to understand, just be. Allow. Find a way to trust the universe.
Reconfigure. Re- con-figurate. Find your greatness.
Breathe and be human. Drop all ego, drop all fear of death and loss and lack.
There is nothing left to lose, except time, and time is not linear.
We have real work to do- it’s to help each other recover.
We are all addicts in recovery. Detoxify. Trust the process.
Help comes from the heavens when we are ready to ask.
The forces of light are here too. Seek and ye shall find.
Let go of all the thoughts racing round in your mind.
Just be still, and listen. Breathe in the steam, listen to the stream.
The meek shall inherit the earth. Follow the rainbow. Let go and let be.
This is a new beginning for you and me.
We are enough. There is enough. We don’t need more.
