A Heckuva Year

Vision Quest, Planet Waves' 2016 annual edition, is fast approaching publication. Pre-order all 12 signs at a great value or choose your individual signs.

Vision Quest, Planet Waves’ 2016 annual edition, is fast approaching publication. Pre-order all 12 signs at a great value or choose your individual signs.


By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

It’s been a heckuva year, Brownie! I imagine you’re just surfacing from an abundance of Christmas cheer (or blues, pick one) today, but due to the wonky calendar of holidays and my writing schedule, I’m having to fold some time and ponder the close of the year. As I write, Christmas is still ahead, with a houseful of dinner guests to arrive tomorrow, so I will wax philosophical with ideas that popped into my head as I polished the silver.

275+Judith_Gayle

To repeat, a heckuva year; and thinking about all that filled the airwaves is really harshing my visions of sugarplums, but time isn’t linear anyhow. We seem to be skipping around a lot lately, sifting through eras past to find cause, and then digging farther still. Seems to me that the patterns are beginning to make themselves more clear by the minute, and that’s a very good thing.

Not that we aren’t used to everything being slightly out of sync these days, and sometimes more than slightly. Seems like the fastest year on record, along with the warmest, but a lot happened and much of it pivotal. Since I expect all the lists to come out this next week, I’ll spare you the details. You may or may not remember all the events, but I’m sure you remember all of the emotions that gathered around them.

How many mass shootings have we endured? I suspect you’ve lost count because they begin to blur in our memory, now that they are no longer considered “extraordinary” events. How many toddlers have killed or died playing with handguns? More than you think, and I was not surprised to learn that the Show Me State holds the title for the most. On the national stage as well as the international platform, how many brutalities have been done in the name of God?

This is difficult to contemplate, but it’s changing, and even if it’s not changing quickly enough, we have come farther than we know. I consider 2015 a year of inoculation, not so painless as a daily drop of Bach Flower Remedy under your tongue, but cumulatively as effective. Many of us have developed a resistance to what is heinous in the world — not just events, but harmful intent and hurtful words as well. We’ve become not just aware of them, but —if we wish — immune to their ability to toxify us.

I recently reviewed a bit of what Neale Donald Walsch calls the larger universe of cause and effect. I’m going to let him do much of the heavy lifting here. and post the link for a more complete explanation. Here are the five principles Walsch proposes, in order.

The Energy of Attraction, which gives you power.

The Law of Opposites, which gives you opportunity.

The Gift of Wisdom, which gives you discernment.

The Joy of Wonder, which gives you imagination.

The Presence of Cycles, which gives you eternity.

Says Mr. Walsch,

The second of the Great Principles of Life works in perfect harmony with the first principle, the Energy of Attraction. This second principle states that no sooner will you attract something into your reality than its exact opposite will also appear …

I am saying that the moment you choose anything — any outcome, object, or experience — its exact opposite will appear in some way…

It is necessary for the “opposite” of whatever you are choosing to create with the Energy of Attraction to show up, for the reason that life cannot be experienced in a vacuum.

A context must be produced in which you may experience what you have chosen.

Because not many people know this, they can easily turn negative in their thinking just when the universe was preparing to place before them all that their hearts desired.

They do not see the appearance of the opposite as a sure and certain sign that they are on the right path, heading toward their chosen objective. Rather, they see it as an obstacle, a blockage.

2015 was a year that exploded out the gate. Right-wing politicians strutted around with what they considered a mandate, while our president was ready to spit in the eye of his “lame duck” label. Early on, he seemed to throw caution to the wind, which many of us found very encouraging. That said, it was a year of ups and downs, accomplishments and tragedies, feeling very much like we were still pushing a boulder up a hill and our muscles were screaming, the soles of our shoes smoking. I think it’s fair to say that many of us weren’t feeling as though any progress was being made, blocked as we were by a large, immovable obstacle.

Obviously, not all of us remembered what the Law of Opposites was actually offering us.

Endeavor to see the appearance of the “opposite” as your first indication that Personal Creation is working flawlessly. Remember that the first step in creating anything is creating a context within which it may be experienced. Do not resist the opposite of anything that you wish to experience. Instead, embrace it. Look right at it and see it for what it is.

What you resist, persists. That is because, by your continued attention to it in a negative way, you continue to place it there. You cannot resist something that is not there. When you resist something, you place it there. By focusing angry or frustrated energy on it, you actually give it more life.

This is why all great masters have urged us to “resist not evil.” Do not fight that which is opposite to your stated desire or your preferred outcome. Rather, relax into it…

Do not become rigid and tense, ready for a battle. Never oppose that which opposes you. Do not OPpose, COMpose.

Compose your original idea of how you want life to show up. And compose yourself while you’re at it. Come from a place of relaxed assurance that life is functioning perfectly. Yet do not confuse relaxation with acceptance.

2015 was a year when many of us surrendered to the process of what channelers would call ‘the purge,’ accepting the facts on the ground, yet turning to other sources of comfort and empowerment like creativity, service to others, holistic practice and staying in the moment. We were altering our way of dealing with the world. Walsh would complement us on our intuitive grasp.

“Resist not evil” does not mean that you should not try to change what it is that you do not choose. Changing something is not resisting something, it is merely choosing again. Change is not resistance, but alteration. To modify is not to resist, but rather, to continue Personal Creation.

Modification is creation. Resistance is the end of creation. It firmly holds the previous creation in place.

Do you see?

At every moment of difficulty and challenge in your life you have a choice: opposition or composition. To repeat: You can either oppose that which you are experiencing, or compose that which you chose.”

There were echoes of this energy this week, and cookie crumbs to follow. One really encouraging Atlantic read on the political patterns of alternating conservative/liberal politics made it clear that Obama has moved the needle despite the obstruction, and set the pattern for clear progress. Those of us who have worked toward this goal should be heartened.

Man of the people, Bernie Sanders, beat Obama’s impressive record of campaign donations during the last debate, with small doners and Millennials backing his progressive movement. The current black-out of all things Bernie in media is an example of the attempt to stamp out that energy, with Establishment politics worried and the DNC in melt-down, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. There are people out there no longer impressed with the negativity and chaos of establishment politics, just now aware that they have a choice. They’re ‘composing’ something different, building on the pattern set by #occupy awhile back.

Let’s make 2016 the year in which we acknowledge what is happening all around us, while what WE are bringing to the table is a bright vision and a willing heart, activists in whatever ways are presented to us. Speaking of tables, I enjoyed an interview with Mandy Patinkin speaking passionately to Charlie Rose about his trip to Greece to personally assist Syrian refugees. He said he felt he had to do something to participate in the global crisis.

He ended with this advice: invite refugees to your holiday, he said, putting me in mind of Eric’s piece on potluck. Break bread with them, listen to their dreams, comfort their children. Get to know them. Make them friends. His last words were specific to the problem of being too much in our heads and not enough in our hearts. “All these religions talk about love,” said Patinkin. “Well, let’s DO IT!”

There’s the vision! And that would be a 2016 worth remembering!

3 thoughts on “A Heckuva Year

  1. Barbara Koehler

    Indeed, the eras are blending together like a Christmas porridge Jude, here’s hoping your houseful of guests for dinner thing went very well. It always amazes me the power that the holiday season has over the minds and hearts of people – at least on the surface and down a couple of inches. We trade one set of anxieties for another set, a more traditional set, as if time stood still for a few days.

    I’m very grateful for the wisdom you have shared here today, a blending of your own with that of Mr. Walsch’s, gives one a sense that all is as it should be for where we are in the scheme of things. Of course, for me astrology is the yellow brick road that leads to ever more assurance that there is order within chaos. The blending of events as they lead from one thing to another defies one’s logical view of them though.

    To the untrained eye it appears to be total chaos but upon examining charts of cyclical conjunctions between the most powerful and meaningful planets as they connect one cycle with another cycle tell us a different story. There is that thread of continuity that suggests a plan; not quite conceivable to mere mortals (unless they all band together in Aquarian style) without giving up their entire life to the cause. I’m not quite there yet.

    In my piecemeal fashion, the recent inclusion into law of a financial compensation to U.S. hostages that have been held by foreign countries, specifically the hostages taken by the Iranians on November 4, 1979, stitched together the charts for the Neptune-Pluto conjunction of 1891, with the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction of 4/18/1881, and the Chiron-Uranus conjunction of December 1, 1898. They in turn connected to the Christmas Full Moon of yesterday and the U.S. Sibly birth chart, joining the past to the present.

    As a transiting planet of the present activates aspect patterns of ongoing cycles (or cycles that made close aspects within larger cycles), one travels back in time to get an understanding of how history’s energy patterns lead to present day results. It can be quite awesome; almost like you have uncovered some secret of the gods and goddesses that they heretofore denied us mortals access to. In doing so, this continuity between history and present day happenings can almost seem logical if not downright inevitable.

    This whole business of equalizing head with heart is – and has been – challenging, but the gods and goddesses saw it coming way back when and have factored in our reluctance to change, along with our penchant for escape and our ability to learn from experience. Gradually the balance is shifting, thanks to you and others who pound away at the principles that will guide us to achieve this balance; this overcoming of polarization. Just keep you eye on the U.S. Uranus in Gemini for further instructions.
    be

  2. aWord

    “Christmas porridge” that’s it, Be! As for the opposites, I’m awaiting! I’ve spent my life looking through the crap at the possibility of not-crap and even the latest hasn’t changed that — just put a bunch of fog around the viewing station (or are those teary eyes?)
    And from another perspective, I keep thinking I’ve cleared my father’s karma, and then bang! there is it all over again (that protestant suffering thing)
    Well, good-doing in 2016 is on my to-do, how could life be otherwise? Composition it is then, Jude. xo

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