Down by the cove, I sat on a fallen tree as the sun coiled back the last fat rays of the season and hid them below the horizon; we enter now the hours of introspection tethered to wan bands of struggling light. These are the lean times in northern climes.
And, though we no longer rely for all our needs on the exclusive produce of our labor over the summer months, there is still a biologically-conditioned feeling that our general fitness at this time is directly related to our stock of acorns. And like any critter on this mortal coil, we are biased to forecast the perils of poverty rather than the excesses of prosperity. We don’t plan for too many nuts.
It is not due to some magical alignment of cosmic forces called into being (or, it might be, but that’s another essay) that we end up where we attend, but rather that we end up there because our attention is scarce and can only be pointed in one direction at any one time. Like the cyclist pitching into the ditch when a heron flies low along the periphery (or me stumbling off the treadmill when looking at the workout timer...), we follow our noses to anxious ends and avoid looking towards the very destination we say we want to reach.
The sun is the god of gold, the noble patriarch of provender. While he shines, we make hay, and the ancients spent the blood of their captives and fashioned fields of ore to placate him and beseech him to fatten them with plenty and starve their enemies. In the realm of narrative, analogy, and metaphor, in which I dwell, where we use the process of homeopathic provings to divine the dynamic power and profile of substances, gold reflects this gravitas. In healthy form it embodies responsibility, wise authority, leading from an earned ascent. In pathological form it holds the failure to uphold this agreement and suffers suicidal depression, tumors, necrosis, decay.
Our currency has not been gold for a long time. It has been corrupted, replaced with “legal tender” backed by force and fraud. Dishonorable people usurped the money and gave us tokenized deceit. Fiat dollars reveal the dark polarity; as they metastacize, the cancer consumes wealth and leaves wreckage. No debased currency, nor the authority predicated upon it, has endured too long an affront to the iron laws of economics, and the dollar is entering its final decline. I make no predictions on pattern or timeline, but I am oriented to a far horizon.
And yet, though we may be asked to hunker down in subsistence, we need not glorify it or abhor comfort. I can know that I am passing through darkness and pain and that this is in the correct order of things, but I don’t have to like it.
Twice in the past few weeks I raised a reaction from someone who decried what they perceived as defeatism in my saying, “They can take everything I love from me and there is nothing I can do about it.” “Not if you don’t LET them!” came the rejoinder. But it doesn’t matter who “they” are, there are forces that, should they focus their intention upon my destruction, cannot be fought to physical submission through any act of my will. That doesn’t frighten me; it sets me free.
I have no desire to emerge, maggot-white and blinking, from a bunker in the fallout fields. My feet are in the soil and my eyes are on the highest light of my aspirations. I watch the world that is waiting to emerge. My intuition is my arsenal and non-compliance is my armor, and if I find my body broken beneath a splintered shield and all that I love laid waste around me, I will know that I am exactly where I am meant to be.
And if, praises be! that bright dawn that comes beyond all hope should unfurl its fattening rays over my steaming skin, I will be glad that I did not avert my eyes or divert my attention from that which I would see made manifest in this best of all possible worlds. If I must release the pommel to reach for the gold ring on this great carousel of life, I will do so.
Will you?