Paris

Usually I like Mondays. I look forward to getting into the office, being able to sit down, have a cup of coffee, and concentrate on something for more than five minutes without being pulled in several directions at once. (luxury, as my stay-home partner keeps telling me). I love my family, and I love my peace.

However, this morning comes hard on the heels of a particularly nasty weekend globally and personally (the landlord has decided to move back in and we need to move out by the end of January). To finish up, one of the three-year-olds was awake for the day at such an hour this morning that I am operating on about 3 ½ hours sleep. So I’m feeling a bit ratty and may start hallucinating before this post is fully written.

Am I surprised I drew the Sun reversed this morning. Not really. It would have been nice to see something different, but I will work with what I have, which is all one can do.  And indeed, this card in reverse indicates a certain lack of vitality, success, and general sunshine. As usually happens with reversed cards, those energies are there to be had, I just can’t get to them at the moment. In some ways this is due to events outside of my control. In other ways it is due to my reaction to these events.

What happened in Paris is an horrific tragedy, the scale of which no one expected and no one was prepared for. It is as frustrating as it is heart breaking. It’s frustrating because the natural, human reaction to such an act is to be angry and want vengeance, which in fact has already begun in the form of air strikes over Syria. Yet that is a continuation of the cycle – more martyrs will be created and more impressionable young people will be recruited. In the meantime there is the potential for similar events to be repeated across the western world, especially since there is no way of knowing how many terrorists came through with refugees over the last few months. We already know of a few, but it is seemingly inevitable there are others.

The goal of terrorism is to instil fear, and that comes from the belief that at any time, in any place, for no apparent reason any of us could be victims. People who live in such fear behave defensively, panic, practice hate and want blood-soaked vengeance, all of which perpetuate the darkness. Only by filling the darkness with light, staying or making our thoughts and actions positive, raising our collective vibration will we break the cycle.

This is easy to say, but what does it mean? How do we reconcile these acts of violence with the knowledge each of us are connected to each other, that we all spring from the same creative source, that we are all part of the whole? Evidence suggests that most people do not believe that, and yet it is true. When we hurt someone else we hurt ourselves, even though our egos are screaming that they bloody well deserve it.

I don’t know what will work for this world, but I do know a few things that don’t work. We, as a people, keep doing those same things over and over again hoping for a different result. That is the definition of insanity.

We do not know what the answer is, yet, but that is a piss poor excuse to stop looking for one. Unless you like what you experienced, some people do seem to.  Or maybe they just like the seemingly valid excuse to go to war. Most of us could live without it if we could only find a way to do so.

Maybe Batman can help us (here comes the aforementioned hallucination). No, wait, his Butler. “Why do we fall down Master Bruce?  So we can learn to pick ourselves up.”