Lenten Diary 7

Remembrance

      There’s a New Moon today at 2:45 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. It will begin a lunation cycle that ends April 29, with the next New Moon. It promises to be one helluva ride, the most significant New Moon “in decades,” according to one astrologer I consult.

     I’m a mere dabbler in the planetary arts myself, but from what I can tell the most intense times will be leading up to the full Moon (“true Easter”) on April 15, then doubling down for a major assault on Easter Sunday and the few days after.

     Rapturists, take note.

     I’m not a rapturist, but I do believe in higher dimensions of consciousness than I normally experience during my waking hours on Earth. So I can kind of see the rapturists’ point. But I’m with those who say our average human awareness is but a sliver of all that’s going on around and within us in worlds we’ve only glimpsed in dreams and thought streams we barely notice or remember. Traditional Heaven and Hell are only two of those possibly infinite dimensions, and it’s odd we spend so much time speculating on just those two.

     That being said, I can feel the pressure building. It’s no exaggeration to say we’re in a crucible on this planet. Just turn on the news. Meanwhile, the astrologers are saying April is the month when tensions will peak. I’m inclined to agree.

     In other words, it’s put-up or shut-up time.

     I’m putting up. It must be part of my Lenten work. I’m helping to organize a month-long event of grass-roots poetry and music at The Venue here in Norfolk. We’re featuring social issues, to let local artists let off some steam and share their visions of a better world.

     That project has led me back to my own work over the last several years–poetry I’d written but only read in public once or twice, then moved it to the back of my notebook. Turns out I had three of those notebooks with many poems I’d nearly forgotten I’d written.

     I found some real winners in there. I mean, poems that animate me, that I know I could perform and bring an audience with me.

     Fortunately, with National Poetry Month on the horizon, I now have that chance.

     I also have my work cut out for me.

     But I have backing. The other night my original guru, Paramahansa Yogananda, came to me in a vision. I thought he’d forgotten about me long ago. But there he was, in the most beautiful, glimmering, colored lights, smiling. Simply smiling. He reminded me of all the teachings that I hadn’t exactly forgotten, but I couldn’t find a place for them in the world any more. He brought them up-to-date.

     This was not a big revelation, like seeing God on acid. But it was a deep one, reminding me that when I can’t see where Divinity is in the world or in myself, I need to take a toke on my pipe, pour myself a glass of Carlo Rossi Paisano, sit down in my rocking chair, turn on the jazz, and close my eyes.