happy president's day (or we're evolving caterpillars into butterflies here)

climate change - keystone xl pipeline rally 2/17/13

Some days it feels like everything is just a huge mess. A mess that is so big and so multi-layered and so out of our hands that it is like we are all living in one of those hopeless hoarder houses with the newspapers and the cockroaches.

On better days we survey the world and say ok - this is what it is - we made this mess, we can unmake it - I wish I was starting from somewhere else but I can only start from right here.

Bruce Lipton (check him out if you haven't already, he connects the spiritual with the science in exciting ways) likes to compare civilization's current spiritual evolution with that of the caterpillar.

(and on days when we cannot imagine we could possibly get from where we are now to where we need to be, this little guy is our guy to think about)

Imagine for a moment we are a single cell among the millions of cells that make up a caterpillar. Our little world has been operating like a well-oiled machine and creeping along most predictably until one day the machine begins to shake and shutter. Systems fail. Cells begin to commit suicide. There is a sense of doom and darkness.

But, from within the dying population of cells, a new breed of cell starts to immerge. They are called imaginal cells (really how cool is that).

Clustering in communities they devise a plan out of the wreckage. They create a great flying machine - a butterfly - that enables the survivor cells to escape the ashes of the caterpillar world and experience the unimaginable (and yet not unimaginable because it is the imaginal cells that did it) beautiful butterfly world.

And the most amazing thing of all is that the caterpillar and the butterfly have the exact same DNA.

They are just receiving and responding to a different organizing signal.

This is where we are in the world today - all of us deciding which organizing signal we are going to tune into. The media is reporting a caterpillar world - doom and gloom with every man-made system in trouble.

And yet, everywhere, human imaginal cells are waking up to a new possibility. They are clustering and communicating and tuning away from the signal of fear and into the signal of love.

Love is not some mushy gushy sentiment reserved for Valentine's Day, but the vibrational glue that will help build us our new flying machine.

We are those imaginal cells - although it may not seem totally evident to us now - the future is literally in our imaginations; in our thinking.

Positive thinking isn't the opposite of negative thinking. Positive thinking is the opposite of wishy, washy thinking. Positive thinking isn't about flowers and puppies; it's the other definition of positive - the one that means certain. 

Yesterday I went to the largest ever U.S. climate change rally - tens of thousands of people (I think 50,000) marching and laughing and singing for change.

( I never sing in public, saving my Lucy Ricardo voice for the shower and poor Olive, but even I was singing yesterday, in fact my throat hurts today - I feel a little like Adele, well except for the genius and the millions of rabid fans)

On the one hand we were hoping to catch President Obama's attention regarding his upcoming Keystone XL Pipeline decision but we were very focused on what we were gathering for, not what we were gathering against (pushing against stuff only gets us to the place of more of this stuff we are pushing against - it puts us in vibration with it - when what we really want is to evolve higher).

Happy President's Day all - I'm off to accupuncture and then going to clean my messy house - the hoarder references have made me a little uneasy ....