Singing into Life a Love-filled Paradigm -- I

Interesting. Hitting a 65-year old layer of anger at the branch of church music that I love the most -- and having found a measure of compassion for myself and the world of choral evensong -- seems to have been the key to expanding a musical metaphor about the emerging paradigm (💖 -- "sparkling heart" world). But bear with me as I back up for a minute.

In the last few months, I've reached a whole 'nother level of not comprehending why people hurt other people, the earth, or themselves. Earlier in my life, I suppose I took to heart frequent admonitions along the lines of, "this is the real world and you'd better get a grip and function within it!" It soon became clear that I didn't function well within it, but I tried to at least accept that it had validity. Sort of along the lines of how I finally began to say "They believe..." at the beginning of the Creed rather than "I believe..." I was the weird one. All you had to do was look at my wandering, unsettled life. I shrank away from violence, competition, the infliction of pain. I cringed a lot.

This has slowly but surely changed to the point where I just cannot take any of it seriously any more -- war, combativeness, threats, domination, over-consumption. Energetically, it is so far beneath the "radio wave" of all-love being broadcast by the incoming Aquarian Age that it is almost like distant radio stations on old-fashioned radios; staticky, coming in loud then soft, voices and music distorted, strange, funny, a sound version of a funhouse mirror. I mean, it is all laughable -- but of course not, because too many people are still being hurt. Perhaps absurd is the best word. Don't the perpetrators feel the new energy?

And yet even I struggle with not simply transferring aspects of the old paradigm to the new. It's too easy to try to retain the duality and the hierarchical structure and thus the fear. That some all-powerful overlord will impose "love" on everyone, and we will have to get into lockstep and superficially act lovingly or we will get into trouble. That darkness and evil will remain under the surface. That in the end, it will be the same old Hollywood conflict of good vs. evil. "Deja vu all over again."

But, it isn't. And I think my heart has finally caught up with my head on this. I feel the reality -- love is not a phenomenon that can be defined as "against", or "opposite", or only half of the picture. It is the whole picture. Its beauty necessarily consists of varied colors and contrasts, but they don't fight each other, they find balance. An oil painter doesn't create a beautiful image in anticipation of the brown paints picking a fight with the blue paints, thereby setting the whole canvas on fire!

So this brings me (finally!) back to choral music, and something that I've touched on before but which seems to become more illustrative by the day. The point of a choir is not to encourage each part to fight the others. "Success" doesn't come when the altos kill off the tenors! It comes when each singer sings their line, sensitive to the beauty of the bigger composition, creating variety amidst harmony and unity.

Some might say, that's easy for her to say! Everyone isn't an artist! Everyone isn't a musician! And yet, we all are. We are musical instruments, receiving the divine song and doing our unique best to transmit it out. In the new paradigm, people won't be so threatened by the fact that other voices sound different. I may be discovering some old anger around my passion for choral music, but the issue was being prevented from singing the music. As a singer, my issue wasn't anger that the basses or sopranos sing in different ranges, or that composers give them different-sounding lines.

This morning, I guess that's my takeaway. As singers singing into life a love-filled paradigm, we will be exquisitely sensitive to the composition we are creating, honoring the sound and nature of our own and other voices. We will understand that in this great loving motet, humans are not the only singers. Lakes, oceans, mountains, animals, plants, inner earth, and swirling galaxies -- all are singing their parts, valid songs that must equally be heard in order for the larger composition to make sense. As we sing our part, our ears still listen carefully to the parts around us. We calibrate our loudness, our entrances, our pitch, the legato or staccato quality of our lines, to what we are hearing around us. This doesn't diminish us. It makes us more thrilling, powerful singers, individually as well as part of the choir. And the important thing won't be our literal singing ability, creating some kind of elite choir out of the whole world. ("Can you sing one of the 40-parts of "Spem in Alium" on your own?") No, whatever our voice sounds like, there will be one primary question when we audition for the choir: do we sing in the key of love? (I handwrote this essay before finding out there are songs etc. using that wording. We're all on a similar wavelength!)

I will be exploring this metaphor some more, I know, because more and more thoughts are coming to me. 'Til next time...

A Twilight time

My next post was going to describe "💖world" more comprehensively than I have done so far, and yet a subsequent event has encapsulated for me the nature of my journey thus far and helped me make peace with it just a bit more, so I felt I had to write about this today.

The other night, I went with friends to a movie shown at a large suburban theatre with reclining seats. There were very few people in attendance, and we were the last to leave, watching all the credits roll by. Suddenly, I saw the name of a conductor I sang under once, years ago in England in a choral evensong service. (I am embarrassed to say that the movie's choral music must have woven its way in and out of the soundtrack of this film so unobtrusively that I wasn't aware of it.) I was both delighted to see a familiar name, and heartbroken.

This brief moment was like so many others in my life, where my connection to the music I love has come at a theatre, or sitting on the floor of a new apartment in Duluth listening on the radio to the funeral of Princess Diana, or sitting on an American couch watching Queen Elizabeth's funeral or the installation of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Yes, I've had more actual experiences singing English church music than most other American women (at Royal Holloway, Lincoln and Canterbury Cathedrals, St. John the Divine, and a few others) -- just enough to have left my heart over there and to remain in this limbo of remote hearing and remote viewing. This is the poignancy and pain of this lifetime. It is so subtle. I realize that I am the most fortunate of women in that my tragedies and turning points involved little violence or physical pain. Yet the other night, I felt physical pain around this. I don't think I've realized how tightly woven anger and church music have been for me...a stubborn knot.

The election proved that there is remarkable resilience in our system -- valid, powerful voices that needed to be heard were heard. Yet whether it is politics, economics, religion, the law, or any other aspect of our system, they are too duality-based to continue to thrive indefinitely.

So this is a twilight time. Having chosen to live at this moment and to be so Goddess-centered, I guess my path was destined to have this strange, dim, reflective, moonlike quality. Even as a choirgirl, I was too post-Christian to ever have fully committed to that world, and I guess I've taken a step closer to accepting this reality. But the beauty of this unique spiritual and musical milieu will always reverberate on my wavelength, even well into the new paradigm.

If we are in the twilight right now, then yes, that probably means that there will be a period of "dark night" (perhaps appropriately a "new moon time" full of promise, yet unilluminated.) But the light will return, and the Aquarian Age will have completely dawned when beautiful, conflict-free love energy saturates earth and all Her beings.

A New Creative Tool

The other morning, I wasn't able to go back to sleep. Just for fun, I opened my dictionary to a random page and mused over some of the words found in the "P's". Perhaps I will share that with you sometime.

It wasn't until a few hours later that I hit another layer of the onion, when an intense wave of anger and frustration broke over and in me. I grabbed a pen and managed to get much of it down on paper -- at first, I was mad at the Goddess (then at God too!). It was almost like Job, or some of the Psalms. Essentially: "OK, I get it that I must have agreed to serving you a certain way in this lifetime. I get it. But really, did it have to be so darned hard? Did I always have to end up feeling set adrift? Did everything in our culture have to feel topsy-turvy from how I would do it? Sure, I never wanted a big house or car, but why was "home" so elusive? Why has community and recognition been so elusive?" And so forth. This went on for several pages before I realized that, in effect, I was expressing Her agony, that She has frustration and anger needing to find a voice. 

The last few pages of this emotional communication was what I guess you could call a channelled dialogue with Her, or some aspect of Her. She was glad I had clearly felt my anger at how unsupportive the world generally is toward feminine energies and instincts -- even if I blamed Her! After listening to me "vent", She essentially said, we're in a new era now, and anger expressed toward other people or situations, or used as a weapon, won't be very effective. From now on, anger and frustration can be brilliant creative tools, rather like clay for a sculptor or oil paints for an artist. Anger can bring forth a clear expression of your truth, so acknowledge it and let it surface: ("Yes, I am angry! This is not how I want my world to be! I feel passionately that the world could be like 💖, and from this day forward, every creative act that I do will have that kind of beautiful world as its goal. This is passion! This is love! What kind of new landscape can I create with them?!")

I've had hours like this before, and have probably told you about some of them, but this was by far the most intensive that I can remember. It was wrenching. At first it seemed strange that it should happen when I'm finally in my own little home, and when I am taking chair yoga classes and moving this stiff body of mine in new ways. But it actually makes sense. Anger and frustration have in large part fueled my whole journey. Absolutely nothing about how we do things has made sense, and constantly trying to understand a strange language has been exhausting. This stress has been building up, stuck in my bones for decades, and now the channels seem to be opening up.

Later this week, I will try to articulate 💖. As Pollyanna-ish as it may end up sounding, what would such a world look like, as concretely as I can describe it? 

The Unexpected

Considering how much change I have experienced in my life (or maybe because of it!), I find the unexpected to be rather hard. Last-minute plans are difficult for me to embrace. Yet since my move almost two months ago, life seem to be happening more quickly, and I have had to become more flexible, and resilient to the unexpected, both positive and negative, while at the same time trying to stay steady in my core. Saying "yes" -- but not to every last thing. This is a balancing act!

A delightful unexpected thing happened the other day when I was downtown, sitting on an outside bench enjoying the sun. I suddenly realized that a family was trying to take a group photograph that perhaps I would be in the background of, so I leapt up to move away. Instead, they waved me in to join them!! Total, lovely strangers! Years ago, out of shyness, I would have held back, but in 2026, it made me so happy. I had a big smile on my face and completely enjoyed my one minute as part of their group. (I can imagine their future family get-togethers, asking, "Who is this woman?"!)

There have been some more negative and unsettling "unexpected developments", and yet for the most part, there has been a beautiful or positive resolution before too long. One thing I am training myself not to do is jump out ahead of life and imagine the negative scenarios that life might offer. It is hard with my background, and in this election season, even with the small snippets of news that I listen to. But I am convinced that this emerging era will be a whole different scenario for an Aquarian like me, and that it will be easier for all of us the more we shed old expectations, embrace the unexpected, and walk forward with an open heart.

It's a sunny, beautiful traditional fall day in the northeast, cool and crisp. Blessings to all of you reading this, wherever you are.

 

The Middle Step

Ever since my post the other day, I have been ruminating some more (in the middle of the night!) about the whole concept of "loving your enemies". It seems like this might be a key place where the old and new paradigms diverge.

Of course, just the concept of "enemies" alone is very old paradigm, born in duality and its need to fight contrast rather than celebrate it. In the new paradigm, people won't want to fight and have "enemies". There will be no benefits to this kind of polarized, angry energy. People will simply be closer than ever to genuinely loving other people just as they are.

But in this transitional moment, what is the middle step between out-and-out conflict (1) and loving your enemies or rising above conflict and creating beauty with no reference to evil (2)? The word that comes to mind -- as sort of a 1.5 in that list -- is compassion. I have never been attracted as much as I should have been to the notion of compassion. My dated dictionary definition is "pity inclining one to be helpful or merciful", and I guess I never found that pity overlay to be empowering to either person in the equation.

But newer and more thorough definitions and etymologies stress more of a state of empathy, understanding others' conditions and sufferings, and it occurred to me that it is a good bridge concept here: if I have the ability to warmly acknowledge that the world is filled with people who aren't like me, I can accept or embrace that some of them won't like me one bit. They might even want to "fight" me. The transitional step between fighting back and saintly disengagement is the ability to look directly at that person and compassionately understand that they are exactly the person they came to be in this lifetime. In the great drama that is 2026, this person (or group) has exactly the set of characteristics they needed to have in this unique moment in history. They are, if you will, playing a role. I'm just another player in the cast -- I shouldn't force anyone to switch roles, any more than I would wish to become a different person under pressure from them.

There's peaceful acceptance in this. I accept that these people and phenomena are what they are. I cannot change them, or try to change them. I can lay down that fight at least!

Part of it is that compassion and acceptance have to start within. I am who I am. I passionately embrace my own right to be who I am, and by extension, others' right to be who they are. Yet that can be scary -- what if that person attacks me? Well, there is no death in the divine paradigm. An "enemy" cannot kill my soul's essential, eternal spirit. I don't need to protect myself. I neither fear death, or the "hell" of that person's rage.

From that stepping stone, it may be easier to evolve upward into genuinely loving more people, or, at times, cutting the tether to extreme negativity completely. 

A New Pattern

My new pattern seems to be to handwrite my essays in the middle of the night. I don't know if this will make for better writing, but it may make for writing on different topics, updating old topics, or expressing myself in a slightly different way. 

I've been mulling over the protests and riots in France, and suspect that we will be seeing similar movements all over the world in upcoming months and years. There has been too much oppression, and people are fighting back. This action-reaction pattern has been a hallmark of the Piscean Age, hasn't it?

Back in the 80's, there were groups and individuals protesting logging in the North American West and Australia, and although some of the events were reasonably nonviolent (blocking roads, people chaining themselves to trees), I still knew I could never take part in this. I am passionately "pro-nature", so what was wrong with me that I couldn't act? Even more recently, I haven't been able to stomach any form of protest "against" anything, even the most despicable people, events, or trends. It is so hard knowing that some good, committed people may see you as weak, passive, or even quietly supportive of the worst humanity has to offer, when nothing could be further from the truth. I know I have touched on this before, but here's my middle-of-the-night take.

As we reach the end of the Piscean Age, patriarchy, and several other ages, the fact is that protest can never really "work" the way it might have in the past, simply because from an energetic standpoint, it throws people and movements downwards, not upwards. Protesters end up matching the phenomenon they are protesting. In this "yes"-based universe, passionate attention props up the thing you oppose. Even efforts to follow the biblical injunction to love one's enemies bring the focus to those enemies and their misdeeds, thereby making these negatives bigger and more visible. Unless we are operating at an amazingly high level and our enemy wishes to be more loving, forgiveness of this kind may not work at all. 

I am convinced that in this Aquarian age there is only one way to deal with violent and oppressive people. First, trust that their energy is so inconsistent with the all-love new age that they will soon be disempowered, and perhaps even dematerialize. (I don't mean this violently or literally -- just that there will be less and less power in rage, and it will melt in a way we cannot yet know. We don't have to "do" anything "to" them.) Secondly, hold yourself in the highest, most loving place possible without any reference to what other people might or might not be doing or thinking. Third, from that high energetic place, create beauty, love, and genuine peace. It doesn't matter if it is art, or poetry, an hour of meditation, a delicious meal to feed the community, or gathering friends for a walk in nature. Just create peace and beauty. Period. That energy will ripple out into the larger world.

So there is no longer any need to reference, fight against, or protest "evil" in any way. Low-level phenomena cannot inspire, usher in, or catalyze higher level phenomena in this emerging paradigm. Those of us who can be genuinely peaceful have probably been like this all along. It's such a relief to enter a time when the pattern that is "us" matches the new overall pattern!

Every Little Journey

As you have gathered, in the 1990's and the early 2000's, I moved around and traveled a lot. While I never drove all the way to California, I took a number of long solo car trips around the country, the most memorable of which brought me to Duluth to live. I also took long train and bus trips, in a few cases not knowing the potential outcomes of my explorations. And of course, over the years, I've flown to England and Europe at least a dozen times. So I am not entirely sure why I've reached the point where it is so hard to travel, perhaps a combination of my age, the times, post-COVID fears, and an awareness of calamitous conditions around the country and the world.

So it was an unusual weekend of two little journeys. One, by train, took me to meet a friend in the Hudson Valley, destination: a crowded, wealthy, artsy, touristy town. On the second trip, I rode with a different friend to an event in a tiny, almost empty, Mohawk Valley hamlet on the first weekend of hunting season. The weekend was a refreshing break. These two little journeys encapsulated some of the intense contrasts to be found in upstate New York, and followed well-worn paths along two great rivers. To that extent, it was very grounding.

At the same time, my longer physical journeys over the years (as well as nonstop down-and-in and up-and-out spiritual journeys) always keep me from grounding entirely. There's a part of me almost flying out of trains, buses or cars, wanting to sing "Wake up, wake up!" to everyone around me! There's a bigger reality upon us, immeasurable changes of every possible sort. And I sense this almost panicky effort of people around me to maintain "life as we know it", a stressed forced gaiety and confusion that ultimately may not be much different from what populations around the country and the globe are experiencing.

So it took more courage than it used to to say "yes" to these little journeys, just as it does to walk into big box stores that completely overwhelm me, or to stand with homeless people waiting for the bus downtown. Billions of humans take billions of little journeys every day. Every little journey is a courageous one, whether you are 7 or 70, stepping out to school or the corner store, or sailing across the Atlantic, or climbing a mountain, or commuting to work by car or subway. Ultimately, we don't know where the journey will take us...we set out thinking we know. We take a deep breath, and we say yes, and we leap -- into a swirling energy that more-than-ever is changing us and our world in real time. Even the little journeys may transmute us. This weekend did just that, and I am glad I had the courage to say yes and not stay "home", now that I finally have one!