Inner Peace Through Troubled Times

Consciousness

Spirit Warrior

There’s still a little air to breathe, and we still have our liberty and property, but society has become dangerous and menacing. In most places, superficial normalcy prevails, but violent weather or crime can break in, anywhere, anytime. Substantial proportions of police are racist and corrupt. And many of our politicians and ostensible leaders are idiots, corrupt, racist, narcissistic, and inveterate liars. Much of the populace denies all inconvenient reality, makes up its own, and worships demagogues. I may be spewing here, but it’s true.

Once there was hope, and reasonably competent, public-spirited leadership, but most of that has succumbed to ego, power, and money (aka, the devil). The florescence happened through my younger years, when the world and my mind were full to bursting, it seemed, with hope and promise. Those times, the years of my life, were arguably the best ever in the history of the planet, for material abundance and personal freedom at least. So, what happened?

We had the power and circumstances to forge widespread prosperity, progress toward truth and justice, and a better understanding of our rightful, humble place in nature. And also of how to get along in a just society. But we’ve sacrificed society’s promise to gods of selfish ego, power, and money. Feeling the juice of power turned our attention from the common interest to power games and plunder, and these have brought us to the existential moment in which we now seem stranded.

We spoiled the earth, air, and water, and just left the wreckage for generations of our kids to come. Had a big party and left the trash heap smelling. Acted like we owned it all, and believed we did. We thought our place was at the top and nature lay beneath, to be dominated and squeezed by us, her upstart “masters.” But now she’s too far gone to save, even if we had the will to really try.

Actually, it’s not nature on the ropes, it’s us. Nature will survive our abuse like an inconsequential scratch while laying civilization to waste. Our self-wrought doomscape matters almost not at all to nature written large. We just made the big mistake of thinking we were its masters and its bounty was our birthright. Oops!

But hey, aren’t we entitled to all our little conveniences and accustomed ways of doing things? Sacrifice and compromise hurt so bad when selfish ego, money, party, and power call the shots. Leaders vamp like pratfall stooges, croaking like frogs about conspiracies and made-up nonsense, whistling to their dogs. No telling yet how long we have before the ruin finally comes, now that we hear the doom-resounding drums a-coming. Nature - and truth and justice - retaliate with vengeance.

This has been the landscape around my life’s journey – dreams and promise turned to dystopia, pending irreparable ruin. Yet through it all, my personal course has been lucky and, all things considered, about as smooth as one might ask. I’m grateful, and comfortable, and growing and learning in the sweetest of natural and cultural environments, in old Santa Fe (and nearby places). I only lament the horrid state of the wide world and its prospects for peace and survival. I have an inkling that we’re heading into the end times for life as we’ve known it in this lifetime.

I wonder each day what’s the meaning of higher personal consciousness in a ruined world? Can personal peace endure societal chaos and collapse? With little agency to rectify momentous adverse circumstances, that higher consciousness, when I can find it, along with my friends, is all the peace I may have when I need it most. So, preserve it and grow I must, onward through the pervasive fog. I just hold my nose against the stink and keep on moving to the light of spirit; that’s the sworn mission of the Spirit Warrior.

I’m glad to be old, with so much experience of life and love alive in my soul. I’m not looking forward to observing and suffering whatever fallout lies in store from ecological, political, diplomatic disasters, but I probably won’t have long to suffer it, or have my fundamental business much interrupted. But I wonder how younger generations with lives ahead of them process it all. When I try to see it from their perspective, it only looks bleak. Very bleak.

*****

This is how I see the context surrounding the end of my seventy-third year. I’ve been retired into this long-running New Mexican adventure for seven years now, and am beginning to think of the present as the end of one cycle and the beginning of another in my life. All was radically new at the beginning – retirement, living reflectively on the bank of the Rio Grande, and being for the first time in twenty-five years without my family near. After seven years, I still have a lively sense of discovery, even in places now old and familiar. But I’ve been here long enough to have lived through and learned a lot, and made New Mexico, for all it is and isn’t, my physical and spiritual home.

The ongoing sense of newness, I think, comes from how the environment, in La Joya, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and elsewhere continually plays new tunes on my heartstrings. I do my best to respond to the cues it gives and bring the harmony. The quality of light and textures of the landscape play dazzling numbers in me with the Maestro’s touch. Fortune’s vicissitudes come and go, but the tune plays on, refreshing and energizing body, mind, and spirit. The key, of course, is staying tuned in. Thus, I proceed on the principle that inner peace, the oversoul, transcends the world and will remain and survive. Though times be troubled, let it be the guiding principle!