Swarming Season (Part 2)

The colony as a whole
arrives at the decision
to swarm
through a felt sense:
the time is right.

The queen doesn’t decide
when the colony will
create the special,
peanut-shaped
swarm cells
into which she will lay
an egg
for the birth
of a successor queen.
 
The nascent queen
is fed a diet of
royal jelly
as she develops
in her chamber,
but again,
it is not the queen
who “orders” this.

The darkness
of the interior hive
symbolizes
the subconscious realm,
the communal womb
from which dreams,
shamanic journeys,
and all intuitive
“knowingness”
arise.

We, too, swarm
from existing
social structures.
We come to
knowingness
in similarly
subconscious
and collective ways.
 
No one person
can order,
or contain,
the coming seismic shifts
in the ground of our shared consciousness.
 
Our conscious minds,
like our governments,
are often
the last to know
of the changes brewing
deep within us,
not to mention
deep within the heart
of our living planet.
 
This mysterious
and natural
swarming instinct
should give you
no
small
amount of hope.

Pressure for collective change
is building
under
the polished veneer of
business-as-usual.
 
Subconscious means
“below”-the-head
consciousness,
and this realm includes
the energetically
wise and
receptive
consciousness
of our bodies.

We feel orphaned
and separate
from Life
because we identify
with the “superior”
boxes
of the mind.
 
In our boxes,
in our proud exile and
isolation,
we have forgotten
how it feels
to plug into the larger consciousness
of the organic life force
through the “current”
of the Now.
 
In its commonality,
in its lack of exclusion,
in its open access to all,
this “current”
has the potential to unite us
with the wordless wisdom
of the body
and the greater body
to which we are united:
the living earth.

This current of energy
runs through everyone and
everything,
without exception.
 
The more often you
swarm from the boxes
of your mind
to come to your senses,
the more you align yourself
with everyone and everything,
the more “here” you are now,
the greater the voltage
of Life “current”
that can
and will
run through you.

Spiritual electricity
is as impersonal
as physical electricity.
It follows certain metaphysical laws.
 
One of the laws
of running greater life current
through your body
is practicing
radical inclusion
in thought, word, and deed.

In supporting and sustaining
all forms of life
without distinction or exception,
Gaia is our best teacher
of this spiritual law.
If you are matter, you matter.
Period.
The word “matter”
is from the Latin, mater,
meaning “mother.”
 
Spiritual attainment,
as modeled by Gaia,
is truly
down-to-earth.

Her spiritual power
is so material,
so common,
and so reliable
that countless species
have built their lives upon it.

Such is the power
of the sacred feminine
and the earth’s example
of a love
radical,
inclusive,
and embodied.
 
For too long in the West
we have worshiped
at the altar of the Father,
the sky,
and the intellect.

But reason
loosed from feeling,
thought
unmoored from body,
and spirituality
disconnected
from the wisdom teachings of the earth
is anything but
rational,
relational,
sustainable
–or sane.
 
Our social order
is built upon
an anti-matter
platform.

We worship at the altar
of powers
immaterial,
out-of-touch,
and unapproachable;
once in the cathedral,
now in forces of the Market.
 
Our Western cultural orientation
enshrines and encodes
striving,
scarcity,
and exclusivity
into the words we speak
and the ways we distribute
value and power.
 
We inhabit an
aristocratic view
of reality,
we the common people.
This is the view we inherited
from our conquerors.
 
We hold a blind and
unexamined
faith
that worth is found
in what distinguishes
something from the rest.

While this misplaced
faith
has long impoverished
us spiritually
(for the sacred is what we hold in common)
it now threatens
to extinguish us
as a species. 
 
For too long
we have uncritically
accepted
and celebrated
a scornful relationship
toward things common.
 
To be common
is to be “vulgar,”
literally,
in our language.
To be common, we feel,
is “beneath” us.

But what is beneath us is
the earth
—our mother, our source, and sustainer of life.
 
The symbolic landscape
we have inherited
is backwards and upside-down.

And so are our ways.