They said the world might well reach its last moments on December 12, 2012, or 12/12/12. But here I am, early in the morning on this day, and I'm alive, and the world is still here. I'm in Thailand, which is now well into its dry, so-called winter season. It rained all night, which is very unusual for this time of year. It was still drizzling this morning, when we got up to meditate. It was hard not to think in metaphors, in lurid symbolism. Could this be an actual watering down, in a way, of the cataclysm we were all bracing for? A reminder that dark times were nearly averted and could return, vengeance-like, anytime, provided we don't learn how to live properly?
Was it just rain? Is anything ever “just” that thing? I’ve come to learn that it’s rarely the case that something is nothing. After all, each of us makes the world, our world, and why would we make nothing? Why would we make at all? The trick, I feel, is to remember, and to remember all the time, that we have made and we do make our world - and ourselves – every moment. We need to be acutely aware of this process of self-creation and world-creation if we want to live in a world that is also a world-of-conscience.
Today, here, now: a dull, light rain in an otherwise sunny and perfect season. Perhaps our fears, then, while dulling us, are also lightening or easing, though they have not completely disappeared. There are some who believe it to be this way: that the end of the world predicted by many has been avoided because of all the work people have been doing with the forces of Light. This is a beautiful idea, that amid news of calamity and destruction and hopelessness, there is indeed a movement of luminosity underway, that underpinning the rain and our fear is beauty and hope for re-genesis – so that it's actually possible to partake in the world's recovery.
There are others still who say it's ridiculous to assume that Mother Nature will cave under the weight of human misbehavior, that nature is much, much stronger than anything we can do to annihilate her. We might meet our end sooner rather than later, but Nature will survive, and prosper, and new life will grow – this is the nature of nature being herself.
What is true is also what is undeniable: we are still here now, and Earth is still here now, and there is as much potential for laughter as for sadness, and as much ability for light as for dark. This, I believe: we make our world, and then we remake it. Every time. Is this fanciful thinking? Because it’s as practical as any thought I feel I’ve had. I can’t imagine anything more powerful than turning a day around by willfully neglecting a negative thought, and I’ve already watched this work and succeed. If it can be done, it’s because we’ve done it. If we haven’t done it, we have absolutely no way of proving it cannot be done. This is logic.
So let's meet the world we have made, see where it can use some work (some of our light), and know that this work is nothing more or less than spinning on the axis of love (we love love, we fear love, we too often narrow the scope of love) and the creative power that belongs – intrinsically so – to all of us.
Let’s also remember: the point isn’t to live forever any more than it is to actively avert death, to get away with not dying. The point is to embrace death as well as all the moments of not-yet-in-death that remain to us.
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