You know, I've often thought that it would take something unimaginable to wake people the rest of the way up. We're so damned stubborn. We always hit snooze. Every unveiling reveals another layer in the infinite onion of self delusion that we have crafted to insulate our species from the glaringly obvious knowledge of our own mortality. Every new environmental movement keeps us from quite having to touch and be burnt by our own interdependent relationship to the world we've scooped out to make room for our stuff. As has been said if we could feel it pure for one moment we would never stop screaming, and yet every time we nudge ourselves toward illumination the pendulums we worship with our fears swing us back into some new dark age.
Yet, in this moment, this chrysalis dressed as a plague, do we finally stir? Do we dare to crack these lidded eyes, riddled with a thousand years of that crust our mamas said was left by the Sandman to give us our dreams; the dreams that yawned into nightmares, from which we built entire counterfeit universes to hide from the mirror? That mirror! Obsidian, edge-less, flawless, and ignored so perfectly we bump into it and take its retractions as being separate worlds shaped like other beings that we must compete with for some ephemeral share of fragile material that becomes another prison of comfort for the seconds until we're bored again.
At first we laughed it off. Just another flu season. Just a bit of a cough. Then it got a little closer but it was still "their" problem. Those people over there, so different, it can't happen here! But it always does, doesn't it? Funny thing about that. Then we braced for impact but conjured up undue faith that the house of cards would stave off the mounting winds. We cried for the surrogate father, we were told the familiar lies, and some novel ones. The Ones Who Know turned crisis into opportunity. The darkness found its advantage and stretched insatiable tendrils into new crevices to drain them of their vitality. The emotional children we call our elders gave the reigns to the bone machine again, betrayed the future, showed us all the system was never here to serve us, unless it was on a plate to some ghastly thing with ever-gnashing teeth and never-filled stomachs.
Here, as the age of the blind ape fades, at last, the animals we deny kinship with creep back onto the land that was theirs and will be again. The waters and the air return to the purity they had before. We are being shown the form the world yearns to return to, and being offered the choice to help it happen or be collateral damage in the salvation of a creation much older and far, far holier than we. We know it. We finally feel the weight of an entire species falling out of balance with its own world. The bill for our collective folly has come due again. Will we pay with grace or have it taken from us by force? We cower not from some great power from the skies but from the invisible nemesis we have unleashed and empowered with our ignorance. We struggle to trust the deceivers that live by pretending they'll solve the problems they cause. The powers of the air cause the problem, they push the narrative, they sell the solution. A scam as old as our schizophrenic race. When will we get the joke and hang the clown? When will we realize it was us betraying us the whole time? The ultimate conspiracy is internal.
Some cry pandemonium in the face of pandemic, but there are no accidents in a universe too perfect for the human mind to understand. The corona is here. The crown virus will strip away the false royals of dying empires and we will have, for this brief window, the chance to coronate ourselves. This gravity in your heart is the weight of the corpses you are dragging, the chain of selves that you fought so hard to preserve at the detriment of the one that yearns to be seen and lived. Which parts of you did you kill, and where did you bury them? Only you know what that means to you, but you do know, don't you?
Every time we almost rise from our graves most of us are are coaxed back into coffins by the monster of the moment. It almost happened 19 years ago. Now COVID-19 is being used to do it again. The story we are being sold is of collapse, panic, a call to embrace dystopia for survival into a world where no one will ever actually live. It's as true as we allow it to be. We are the great magicians who call the world into existing with our compliance, our complacency, and our misplaced faith in authority that comes from nowhere. The most paranoid phantasms of conspiracy theory are breathing down our necks as increasingly immediate realities. The old world feels its death as we wake, and it wants us to join it in its desperation. It will not go quietly. It will not go without dragging as many of it as it can into the great grinder at the center of what we call time, for lack of a more accurate word. Many in their fear will join it, oil the machine, and feed it their loved ones to stay here an extra second.
But not you. You're allergic to the "new world order," because you were raised in chaos. Its in your blood, in your marrow. It shaped your musculature, gave you new reflexes. You saw this coming before you could do anything but cry. Sometimes it's still all you can do. It's OK. This is death. It doesn't feel good until it's over, and then it pays back all that pain with interest. You'll see, and you know in your heart. You have eyes to see and ears to hear in a world where the one eyed monster is king and everyone's got headphones in. It's dog eat dog world, but you were never meant to be food. You burn to feed others. But first, you have to find your own tree of knowledge, and eat the fruit of your spirit. Then you can finally pull out all the cables, cut all the ties, walk out of the comfortable shadows and bring your torch to the ones who are ready to see.
The Hollow-gram has never been louder, and never more invasive. You won't reach everyone. Don't worry. We are distributing this labor/pain worldwide across the mycelial network. You'll graduate from the Invisible College and touch the ones you're meant to. The ones you don't, you can't. Don't do this to feel cool. Don't do this to feel holy. You are not the surgeon, you are the instrument. You are striving to embody the Great Work of resurrecting the body of Christ one human life at a time. That's what matters, not you. Sorry. But don't lose the love for yourself, and don't collapse before the world does.
The media mediates. It divides, and its masters conquer. Do not listen to the sirens lest you wreck your ship and drown. As best you can, be not afraid. The angels always open with that because we're so prone to shrink in the presence of light, even as now, when it's dressed as the darkest moment of recent history. Oh a part of us wants it so bad. We know we lost our way, we revel in the suffering that we feel we deserve. We perpetuate the fractalized toxic relationship that begins inside and spirals out across the planet and MY GOD THE HORROR CAN ECLIPSE YOU but do not let it. Do not pledge your allegiance to dead flags and false idols.
Smile through the torture. Laugh at the jackals that threaten to pick your bones. The "main stream" is a poisoned river. Ignore the story that you're dying with the black iron prison and choose to write your own, finally, goddammit. The lives we worked decades to build are falling apart like scarecrows in a hurricane and this finally shows us how pointless our disguises are, no matter how perfect, no matter how much money and time and blood we poured into them. What matters, at last, is who we were before we let someone else tell us who to be.
Do you see it? Do you see the silhouette of that quivering child against the flames of this false world as it burns and as its counterpart in your spirit is consumed? Reach out to it. Call it forth. Let it tell you what to do next. It was waiting for you. Wake, and embrace that little warrior that fought off death for your entire life to give you the chance to be its realization after you at last got tired of playing a role you weren't cast for.
The land cries out for relief. We will return to it one way or another, either as its faithful stewards as intended or as the soil of the next aeon from which a new world may some day sprout seeds after the death we have sown gives way to new life. The great show is over. The house lights are on. Time for us to see who we are when we're not in the dark and we're not distracted by some all-consuming fiction. Mourn not the caterpillar you were. It has been destroyed and reintegrated along an ineffable order higher than any human construction, and now your real colors are at last available.
Dry your wings. Take back the sky.