The New Moon in Cardinal Fire
On the 5th April at 9:50am BST
The climb has felt steep. Ahead, however, is what you’ve been seeking – a way through. Feeling the massive weight of gravity and your sweat soaked clothing, you pause in reflection of all that you have been through.
It has not been easy as you have battled the endless inane chatter of your monkey mind, having to dig deeply in just to keep going when the easy option was to stop and descend back to the safety of the flatland. But something in you could not return. Something has compelled you to keep travelling up and out. Something has wanted to resist the allure of sleeping soundly, washing your mind of memory and living serenely in blissful ignorance.
It has been exhausting, requiring much more conscious effort and active participation just to keep focused and to keep moving along this surprisingly jagged and convoluted path. It has not been the nirvana painted by those who’ve observed from afar those who’ve travelled here before you.
The battle that has waged within, as your body has resisted your well-intentioned attempts to prepare for this trip. Distracting thoughts of pleasurable poisons have slowly danced in an erotically enticing, alluring and beckoning manner before your eyes, as your commitment has been tested by their amnesia cloaked mantra of “just this one time”. The consequences have been too much, though, and appealing to the inner Calvinist, you’ve stayed resolute, safe in the knowledge that your body cannot take it anymore.
Yet the tiredness has been unrelenting. Sleep has not been replenishing, your night-life has been filled with lucid experiences, profound messages and striking insights, too clear for you to dismiss as being flights of fancy and incidental. Meditation too, has not been fully restorative, as your mind is working overtime, filled with images of people and scenarios long forgotten, yet triggered by each laboured footfall of this slow pilgrimage.
Peace of mind has been hard to find as anger surprising companionship has consumed your mind with righteous indignation and pride within the replay of so many unresolved emotionally charged situations, viewing them from differing angles and perspectives, enslaving you to your past, adding further weight to that which you shoulder.
How thirsty you have been as your body has shed so much water, through tears of remorse, through tears of joy, waterfalls of sweat cascading from your brow as the heat increased, your heart working harder, breaking open, wider and wider, encouraging you feel more and more. How vulnerable it has felt to feel so much pain and to experience so much joy within this awakening state. How irrelevant it has felt to carry so much resentment and animosity towards yourself and those whose ravenous beaks pecked carnivorously into your sOul.
Yet somehow, you willed yourself to keep climbing. Maybe it has been driven by the emptiness that had grown inside, fed by fear and by living in the future; maybe it has been the willingness to leave behind what you have outgrown, even those you love and who love you in turn; maybe it has been the forgiveness mantras – both of yourself and of those with whom have schooled your heart in hurt – that you have been uttering silently to yourself; maybe from this lofty elevation you have begun to glimpse the unexpected fruit those dark gifts have planted; maybe you have just reached a place within that is no longer interested by living within the seduction of safety and the grey promises of conformity; maybe it has been the awareness of the precious gift of time and how little of it is left. Whatever the reason, you kept going; you kept climbing; your kept persevering.
And here, near the top of your mountain, is a darkened hole in a massive cliff. A moment of despair washes through you as you realise that there is no way around it. It is too steep to climb and you cannot return down. Frustrated at the effort you have invested, the time you have spent climbing, the exhaustion from the exertion you have undertaken, you surrender, after all, you have no other choice but to crawl through. On your hands and knees you drop and crawling tentatively forward like a pre-walking infant into the dark you merge.
The darkness hits you like a wall. It is so thick, so vast, so present onto which the inner workings of your sOul light it up, so viscerally, so tangibly, so immediately and once again you are back reliving your past emotional encounters and experiences. It dawns on you why you journeyed so painfully up and out – so that you could travel in and through more peacefully! Within this Dark there is nothing but yOu. All that is within you cannot escape or be ignored. All that is painful is more keenly felt; all that is remorseful is profoundly relived. Everything is simpler in this place. There is no hiding. There are no longer any distractions to catch your eye and mind. There is no escape and there is no turning back.
Crawling on, the darkness closes in around you as the tunnel narrows. Feeling your heart beat loudly within this utter silence, your heart flow more fluidly and freely enabling you to feel the heat of your heart flow through you. Your breath slows as the air gets thinner and your eyes are blind. Within this cocooned space, the quality of your inner world is unavoidably transparent as there are no distractions to divert your attention from your perception. This Darkness is as alive as the Daylight; this Darkness is as dynamic as the Daylight; this Darkness is the same as the Daylight! There is no mirror. There is no outer world. It has been devoured by the Dark.
Another thought arises –the only sight and light that matters is in-sight and in-light. It is life giving and with that, you close your eyes, permitting the darkness to sweep upwards and utterly consume you. For a time you float, nameless and lost as a pinpoint of flickering consciousness; an unknown swimmer through a black and empty sea. Then a single note invades the Void. It reverberates, a soundless sound. Emerging out from that sound swims a billion clusters of light, drifting by, ablaze with this single source of energy. In riots of colour they spin, giant reds and blues, the smaller oranges and yellows, and the tiny reds and whites. The colourless and angry black ones drink in the storm of light around them, and a few twist the fabric of space and time, sending your vision swimming as you tries to fathom their passing.
From each to each a line of force stretches, binding them all in a web of power. Back and forth along the strands of this web, energy flows, pulsing with a life that is not yet life. The stars know as they fly by. They are aware of your presence, but acknowledge you not. Around you stretches away the whole of the universe.
You notice that at various points on the web, nodules of light rest or work, each different from the others, but all somehow the same. Some you can see will be seen as gOds, others avatars or guides. Each plays a role as they direct their conscious intention along a strand of this web.
You choose a single thread of light and follow it, speeding amongst the stars and these beings of power, until you spot your destination – a single blue planet shrouded in white clouds and a finer invisible matrix of this light.
The consciousness matrix plunges deep into the solid surface of the planet, lighting up every living and non-living thing, surrounding it in a tapestry of possibilities following the lines and curves of this sacred geometry. Everything that you can see is made up of this energy and this planet is pulsing with potentiality, all lines connecting each and every living and non-living form to each other; all connected back to the Source.
The cloak of time is drawn over you as you start to sense your surroundings. What is that sound, you ask.
It is an alarm to make you fall asleep, you hear softly whispering through you.
Suddenly jerking awake, you open your eye. Spring has dawned…
All rights reserved – www.andrewsmith.ie and Andrew Smith. Completed at 10:20 BST, 31st March 2019.
