Well my friends, now we are coming into an interesting 3-week micro-era - a time where the future is unclear and yet… we must make some action. We have to be very cagey and non-naive and also keep hope alive in the wings. We have to stay connected online and maintain our equilibrium. We have to look out for each other and look out for ourselves. We have to be ruthlessly “authentic” and we have to maintain some shreds of mystery and awe.
Things.
Are.
Weird.
Right.
Now.
For sure, those of us who are multi-faceted in our awareness have an advantage here.
For me, the only way I can navigate eras like these is by turning inward enough that I connect to something greater*. Then, that something greater and I work the problems until solutions I NEVER COULD HAVE COME UP WITH MYSELF come to the fore.
The reason I never could have come up with those exact solutions is because they require other people and events to come to fruition.
The something greater has intel on those infinite possible connections that I don’t. When I reach out for that level of help from the something greater, synchronicities lead my way like fireflies lighting up the path.
And, somehow protection arrives.
Even in very hard times, as these are, I do get thrilled here and there by the synchronicities I encounter (invite?) as my path unfolds.
That connection to something greater makes living in these times feel like a meaningful quest (albeit dystopian) in which I have some divine protections rather than a sentence to be served.
So I’ve got some top tier options for increasing synchronicity as we go through the first third of April 2024.
The April Free Page is up and 100% about wisdom and self-knowledge (MIRROR and MIRROR 2) and non-hyper-masculine power (THE MAGICIAN)
Hematite Crystal Meditation Friday, April 5th at ROAM LA - this is going to be a special experience calling on Hematite for a grounding “more than human” experience resulting in the creation of “new armor”
99 VISIONS is still sold out. However, if you have a copy, I recommend VISION 35 - NEW ARMOR
Listen, these are trying times. I’m not here to tell you that they aren’t.
I’m also not here to tell you that meditation solves everything.
I am here to tell you that meditation helps a lot.
I’m also here to encourage you to become as anti-fragile** as possible for the next few weeks; and, feel free to move in stealth.
And, I’m here to point out that magic is waiting in the wings for you.
I KNOW we can make our way through.
I BELIEVE there are powerful energies here who want to help us.
It is up to us to crack open the doors and let those beneficent energies flow in.
Let’s see what we can do…
Until next time,
Jess
“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
– Neil Gaiman
“Does what goes on inside show on the outside?” the young Van Gogh wrote to his brother. “Someone has a great fire in his soul… and passers-by see nothing but a little smoke at the top of the chimney.”
Meanwhile, we move among other chimneys — all the taller built by the artful self-masonry of social media — from which we intuitively infer, even if we rationally understand this to be an illusion, that the fires burning in others are far tamer than those roiling in us; that they live with far lesser levels of confusion and complexity; that we are, in other words, not normal by comparison.”
- Maria Popova
THE IMPORTANT THING
The important thing is to tell yourself a life story in which you, the hero, are primarily a problem solver rather than a helpless victim. This is well within your power, whatever fate might have dealt you.
—Martha Beck
"Art is an engagement of the senses; art sharpens the acuity with which emotions, and the other senses, are felt or imagined (and again, here, it challenges reality: What is the difference between feeling happy and really being happy? What is the difference between imagining you can taste something and really tasting it? A hair's breadth; a measurement less than the thickness of a dried work-skein of ink on paper).
And then the kicker is this: in passing from the real to the imagined, in following that trail, you learn that both sides have a little of the other in each, that there are elements of the imagined inside your experience of the 'real' world - rock, bone, wood, ice - and elements of the real - not the metaphorical, but the actual thing itself - inside stories and tales and dreams."
- Rick Bass
I. HOW TO LOVE THE WIND
Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire.
Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind. This summarizes this author’s nonmeek attitude to randomness and uncertainty.
We don’t want to just survive uncertainty, to just about make it. We want to survive uncertainty and, in addition – like a certain class of aggressive Roman Stoics – have the last word. The mission is how to domesticate, even dominate, even conquer, the unseen, the opaque, the inexplicable.
How?
** II. THE ANTIFRAGILE
Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile.
Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. This property is behind everything that has changed with time: evolution, culture, ideas, revolutions, political systems, technological innovation, cultural and economic success, corporate survival, good recipes (say chicken soup or steak tartare with a drop of cognac), the rise of cities, cultures, legal systems, equatorial forests, bacterial resistance… even our own existence as a species on this planet. And antifragility determines the boundary between what is living and organic (or complex), say, the human body, and what is inert, say, a physical object like the stapler on your desk.
The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which also means – crucially – a love of errors, a certain class of errors. Antifragility has a singular property of allowing us to deal with the unknown, to do things without understanding them – and do them well. Let me be more aggressive, we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I’d rather be dumb and antifragile that extremely smart and fragile, any time.”
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile
"A mind fed on words such as heaven, earth, dew, essence, cinnabar, moonlight, stillness, jade, pearl, cedar, and winter plum is likely to have a serenity not to be found in minds ringing with the vocabulary of the present age - computer, tractor, jumbo jet, speedball, pop, dollar, liquidation, napalm, overkill! Who would thrill at the prospect of rocketing to the moon in a billion-dollar spacecraft if he knew how to summon a shimmering gold and scarlet dragon at any time of the day or night and soar among the stars?"
- John Blofeld
"Children understand that 'once upon a time' refers not only - not even primarily - to the past, but to the impalpable regions of the present, the deeper places inside us where princes and dragons, wizards and talking birds, impassable roads, impossible tasks, and happy endings have always existed, alive and bursting with psychic power."
- Stephen Mitchell
“Poetry is not a fancy way of giving you information; it’s an incantation. It is actually a magic spell. It changes things; it changes you.”
- Philip Pullman
Very helpful