Wild And Weird, But What Happened To The Mayan Apocalypse?

Oh the best laid plans…you know the end of that quote.  I had all these plans to get so much writing done on my time off!  Blog posts queued up, WIP work, but darn reality anyway, threw me for a huge loop.

On the 19th, I woke up early to blood spattered all over the downstairs.  No kidding.  It wasn’t exactly a bloodbath, but someone had a big problem.  My 13 year-old male kitty, Jasper, had a ruptured abscess.

I know, ick!  He’d given no sign of having any issues, so it was a complete surprise to me.  I had a crisis and a meltdown.  I thought it was something way worse and I was convinced I was going to have to put him to sleep.  I cried a lot, then my brain kicked back into gear and I was able to get Jasper a little more cleaned up and a better idea of what was going on.  By the time Hub got home from work to help me get him to the vet’s, I had stopped crying hysterically calmed down, and figured out that maybe it wasn’t as bad as I had originally thought.  Note to self:  It’s better to think things through before going straight to “He’s gonna die!”

Kitty came home from the vet’s that night, and I said many grateful prayers while I watched over him.  He was pretty weak the first couple days, and it’s a good thing I did have time off.  He wouldn’t eat or drink on his own.  He would drink water if I gave it to him in sips from a syringe.  He nibbled delicately at the baby food that I presented to him on a spoon, but would turn his head away after a bare half-teaspoonful.  Which meant I was spending an awful lot of time on the floor of my bathroom to keep him hydrated and fed.

Sleeping is what he’s best at.

Now we’re in the home stretch, and he is well on his way to a full recovery.  Yay!  Stitches come out Wednesday and my two weeks of keeping Jasper isolated from the rest of the animals can finally end.  His brother, Sage stands outside and paws at the door, missing his wrassling buddy.  Sister Magic, on the other hand, has appropriated Jasper’s favorite sleeping spot in his absence.  It will be good to finally be able to get things back to quasi-normal.

Then, it was the holidays.  Meh.  I just was not that into them this year, the commercialism seemed overdone and tacky.  I wasn’t even sure I would put up a tree, I was in such a bah humbug mood.  But Jasper on the mend seemed like the best present I could ask for, and I began to feel a bit more celebratory.  So when Hub put up the tree on the 20th, I put up the ornaments.

I did end up decorating the tree once Hub put it up.  Can you find Han Solo and Gene Simmons?

Then, there was visiting with the grandkids.  Let’s just say, I never knew how much fun it was to run and scream and race through the house wielding an inflatable sword while chasing down a three year-old.  It got better when youngest grandson would abruptly slide to a halt and reverse course to dash after me, screaming just as loud.  I let him catch me and beat me up with his own inflatable weapon… a mallet with who on it?  Thor of course!  Joy!  I haven’t had so much fun since I was a kid!  Writing anything was a distant second to running and playing with small children I haven’t seen in months.

But what about that Mayan Apocalypse?  Big Nothing? Or…?

Oh Mayan Apocalypse, you were hyped and feared, but where were you?  No asteroid slammed into the Earth, no massive pole shift rearranged the continents and, to my utter disappointment, no aliens appeared in the skies above.  Worst of all, NO zombies!  So what was it all about?

It doesn’t matter what everyone else said.  In short, the Mayans said this was the end of one age and the start of another.  Sure other ages had ended in cataclysms, but this one was different.  This one was about a spiritual change.  You can read about it yourself, in this interview with a Mayan Elder.

There were lots and lots of expectations and predictions about this date.  What was I expecting to happen though?  Nothing so Earth-shattering.  But I wanted to observe the solstice and the galactic alignment as a sacred day, so I took the 21st off.  (And I wanted to be home, just in case there were zombies!)

The winter solstice is a time of rebirth, renewal and sparking the sacred fire of creativity, and I treated it as such.  I did a little something that day of everything I want to achieve in the coming year; writing, gardening, eating better and exercising, taking better care of myself and opening myself to greater spiritual growth.

It worked.  I felt the shift within, and I felt my meditations, my awareness step up to a new level.  I felt that influx of energy from the universe and knew that everything I wanted was within my reach.  More, I realized that the only one holding me back was…me.

I’m not saying I’m suddenly this perfectly aligned, spiritual being.  Ha!  The one thing about this date that got left out of all the hype:  December 21st marked the shift, the end of one age and the start of the next.  It was never about instant enlightenment or instant change, but about one cycle ending and another one beginning.  ‘Beginning’ being the operative word in that sentence.  We are at the very start of something wonderful, but all change comes with a measure of chaos and upheaval.  This next cycle is about raising our consciousness, about tapping into all those wonderful abilities that are latent or sporadic and bringing them fully to fruition.   We have a very long way to go, but I feel confident we can all get there.

I found this meme making the rounds on Facebook:

I take great joy and hope from watching old, outdated systems of thought and behavior die away to be replaced gradually with ones involving more humane treatment of our ecosystems and ourselves, greater awareness of Spirit, and greater realization of just how powerful we really are.

How did it go for you?

Weird Weekend – How Much Weirdness?

Can one person take?  Am I the only one who thinks that spending $733 million dollars on political TV shows just how weird priorities have become?

 

Only a few more days….

 

Until then, I offer up this more conventional weirdness.  UFO’s caught on tape.

 

Weird Weekends Return!

Credit where credit is due: http://www.allnewsweb.com/

Our world is a lot stranger than you might think.  Ghosts, UFO’s, Bigfoot, Atlantis, the Loch Ness Monster and more have been a part of our society’s framework for decades.  But have you ever noticed that when any of these extra-normal topics surface, people tend to lower their voices, as if they were talking about something shameful?  There’s still a social stigma attached to ‘those types’ of discussions.  You can find on the interweb as many who disbelieve and debunk as those who have eyewitness, firsthand, or photographic evidence.  My goal is to try and break up that stigma.

What is the truth?  That is something we all have to decide for ourselves.  No, not every sighting, picture or video is real.  Obviously.  But with the body of digital data and eyewitness events growing by leaps and bounds, is right to just dismiss everything out of hand?  I’d like to offer up that we should instead be looking at and considering this rapidly growing body of data.  Science can hold the key, but science does not have all the information.  We are not reaching for the peak of all we can know, rather it is an ever-expanding pool.

Personally, I have firsthand knowledge that there is a larger reality than is currently accepted, because I can see and talk with those who live on the ‘other side.’  With Weird Weekends, I want to bring to you the strange, the out-there, the unbelievable, and the mystical.  I hope you will look at these with a fresh and open eye.

Can we talk about aliens?  It’s one of my favorite subjects.  When I was a kid in grade school learning about the solar system, I was taught that ours is the only planet with water, with life.  I was even told that it was highly likely that Earth was the only planet with any life.  That life was so incredibly complex, and the conditions on Earth just so unique that the odds were against it developing anywhere else.  I was told there was no way to travel between the stars because of the incomprehensible distance separating them.  There would be no light- or warp speed.  Childhood dreams crushed under the vicious bootheel of scientific reality.  Sigh.

Not really.  The dreams just matured.

We have managed to lob satellites to fly by all the planets and moons circling our little sun.  We’ve even dropped landers on some of them.  Guess what our little robot friends are finding?

This is not Earth, this is Mars. Pretty, isn’t it?
Credit where credit is due: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/jan/27/mars-snow-space-technology-nasa

Like Curiosity on the Martian surface.  Just this week, it sent back pictures of an ancient streambed, verifying that at one time water flowed freely on Mars.  Satellite images returned from orbit show what is likely seasonal flows of water on the surface.  And as we already know, where there’s water, there’s life.  I think it’s pretty cool that within my lifetime we’ll likely have verification of life on other planets.  That’s pretty incredible when you think about it; in just 3 decades we’ve gone from being certain we were alone, to postulating life on some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

We are only one system on the outer rim of a galaxy comprised of billions of these systems.  The Kepler Mission is finding that planets circle nearly every star it looks at, and Kepler is only looking at one tiny segment of the sky.  It is only a short time until they find Earth’s twin circling a distant sun.  It is not just likely, but probable that advanced, intelligent life has evolved ‘out there’ in the cosmos.  The next question then is, have they ever come here?

That’s just one of many ‘best of’ ufo videos out there.  I particularly like the footage of the discs in the sun.  Are they real?  You decide.  Some of the clips are more compelling than others.

Why would they come here?  Why not land and introduce themselves?  Seems kind of stupid to fly a bajillion miles across interstellar space to just draw a design in the grass and fly back.  Right?

Credit where credit is due: http://mysteriesandsecrets.blogspot.com/2012/06/crop-circles.html

Why not?  It’s not as if we don’t do the exact same thing, right here on Earth.  We don’t ask permission of the wolves, or sharks or elephants when we radio tag them to track their movements.  We don’t even try and communicate with fellow denizens of our own planet that use sounds to communicate, understand grammar and syntax, and whose own vocalizations and behaviors demonstrate name recognition.  (Dolphins, in case you were wondering.)  It is entirely possible that to a visiting alien species, trying to talk to a human would be like trying to discuss physics with your cat.

It is interesting that most Americans believe in UFO’s today.

What do you think?  Are UFO’s all some crazy person’s delusion?  Or is the Earth is being visited?  Could we have been visited in our past?

Speak up!  Don’t be shy!  I really love to hear your thoughts, so tell my why you agree, or disagree.  All viewpoints are welcome.

Weird Weekend – Today’s Eclipse, The Mayan Prophecy, And Extraterrestrials

Website where I found this image: http://www.museumoftheweird.com/2012/05/12/mayan-calendar-extends-well-beyond-2012/

So today’s post was going to be something completely different, but then I remembered what today is…it’s May 20^th, 2012!  And something incredible will take place in our skies.  If you’re east of the Mississippi, well, sorry, it won’t be visible to you, but for us west coasties and desert dwellers we will be treated to an annular eclipse of the sun.

What’s that mean?  Annular and total eclipses of the sun occur when the entire disc of the moon passes in front of the disc of the sun.  With a total eclipse, the sun is completely obscured and it becomes nighttime dark.

This video shows a cool ground view, with inset of the moon’s transit across the sun:

 

 

In annular eclipses, the moon does not completely obscure the sun, but leaves a bright ring of fire, and the darkness is not as deep.

As I write this, it’s due to start in just a few hours.  Here’s the path it will travel, timetables, and the website where I found this map:

 

 

http://earthsky.org/tonight/annular-eclipse-of-the-sun-china-to-texas-on-may-20-or-may-21

 

From the purely scientific it’s a pretty cool thing.  Here in Puget Sound we won’t get the full, annular view, instead it will look like a partial ring with the open ‘horns’ pointing toward the lower left.  Actually, I’m unlikely to see anything at this point.  After weeks of gorgeous clear weather, the usual Seattle rain has settled back over the skies in an unwelcome blanket.  While my garden is a little thirsty and the moisture is welcome, the timing couldn’t be worse!

Throughout the centuries, eclipses have been viewed as deeply mystical events, feared or welcomed.  Sacrifices and prayers were made to ensure the safe return of the sun.  Ancient Chinese, Mayan, Egyptian and other cultures made studies of the sky and were able to predict their occurrences.  Diverse cultures from around the globe tell stories of the sun being consumed, native Americans say a bear, the Chinese, a dragon, Nordic cultures tell of the sun being chased and eaten by wolves.

This eclipse carries an added, mystical significance.  It marks the alignment of the sun, moon, galactic center, and the main star of the Pleiades star cluster.  This group of stars is significant in both the ancient Mayan and Egyptian cultures.  Depending on which website you read will find that this day will see a huge energetic surge in the process of uplifting the Earth and her peoples in their evolutionary progress.

Much of the furor surrounding 2012 concerns not an end of the world, apocalyptic scenario, but rather the Earth moving into a higher vibrational state.  This alignment supposedly represents opening a doorway to these higher states, which the Earth will slowly move into.  Some have called this upcoming time the Age of Aquarius.

In the astronomical sense, we are at the cusp of precessional movement from the Piscean age into the Aquarian age.  This alignment is one that only occurs every 26,000 years, and pinning down an exact date is not an easy thing,  with many conflicting reports.  Determination of which age we are in is calculated by the position of the rising sun on the spring equinox and which astrological sign is seen behind it.

Movement through each age takes roughly 2500 years, and defining characteristics of each sign are said to correspond to Earthly events; for example, during the Taurean age, worship of the Apis bull in Egypt rose.  The Piscean age saw the rise of Christianity, Buddhism and other religions, and is to represent humanity’s deepening spirituality.  Others go further and claim that we have allowed the ego to take over and bury our spiritual nature beneath dogma.  In the Aquarian Age, this and other illusions are supposed to be removed, allowing for greater group awareness and expanded consciousness.

In researching this, I found a number of websites that added an extraterrestrial component.  Some state that this date, this eclipse were predicted by the Mayans as the return of the gods from the Pleiades.  Others showed crop circle formations that decoded to indicate this date as significant.  Not sure how a crop circle is decoded, some claim the aliens making them are using a binary code.  Interesting reading, but not one I can have a firm opinion about.

Here’s some of the sites I visited:

 

http://www.thetruthbehindthescenes.org/2012/04/30/annular-solar-ring-of-fire-eclipse-of-may-20-2012/

 

http://www.hogueprophecy.com/2012/05/annular-eclipse-2012-and-earthquakes/

 

http://soundofheart.org/galacticfreepress/content/preparing-may-20-eclipse-and-ascension-trigger

 

http://www.ourufosociety.com/ufo-news-articles/galactic-alignment-may-20th-2012/

 

http://www.astrodynamics.net/Articles/Cycles/Age%20of%20Aquarius.htm

 

Are you somewhere you can see the eclipse?  Will you be partying in the shadow or hoping to feel the energetic surge?  Will you let me know if you do feel or see anything?  Because here in the Northwest, even if aliens do plunge out of the sun, I won’t be able to see it.  However, if my Wild Wednesday post doesn’t go up, blame our new ET overlords.

Lastly, do you think 2012 is a time of transition, as the Mayans and others claim?  Or will this year come and go with nothing more exciting than the political comic drama currently taking place?  Hope to hear from you!