The Complacency of the Familiar

Oracle Cards:

✨ Mama Qocha: Goddess Power Oracle by Colette Baron-Reid

🌀 Duality: The Priestess of Light Oracle by Sandra Anne Taylor & Kimberly Webber

✨ Metamorphosis: The Healing Waters Oracle by Rebecca Campbell

🌀 Completion: Mystical Shaman Oracle by Alberto Villoldo, Colette Baron-Reid, & Marcela Lobos

How much of our life is spent seeking safe harbor, ignoring the vast and tumultuous beauty of the open sea? I have an abject fear of the wild ocean - I literally cannot even watch a movie that depicts a storm on the sea, so visceral is my terror. It is an encoded fear that goes much farther back than being scarred from watching The Poseidon Adventure as a child. There's got to be a morning after, right? Interestingly enough, I love the water. Floating on the lake in the summer, the crystalline blue of the sky and the lush green of the mountains surrounding me, held in a chalice of tranquility. As a kid, I would sit on the bottom of our pool, seeing how long I could hold my breath, loving the eerie quiet, looking at the sky refracted by the water. I've also had three near drowning experiences, one in a lake, one in a pool, and one in the ocean. Water for me represents the mystery of the both/and, her lethal beauty at once alluring and terrifying.

The same can be said for our emotions, containing all of the mystery of life in our hope and fear, our love and anger. Life is not either/or, a simple dualistic structure in which experiences are either black or white, this or that. Sadly, we have been led to believe that our lives must be defined by either/or, and have created such deep divisions among ourselves in the process. With the exception of evil, everything in life is a little bit of both. Recognizing and embracing the inherent duality of life is a challenge, for it calls us to look not only at our safe harbor, but at the wild sea, and recognize that neither is wrong, just different. One of my teachers once said you don't have to make vanilla wrong because you like chocolate. The impetus we have to classify and categorize and contain life in convenient buckets that we deem good or bad is in many ways the root of all evil. It allows us to "other" - to make something wrong because it is not a carbon copy of what we know and like, because it defies our self-imposed mould. We are watching the consequence of that play out in real time right now, in a human drama that has escalated from simply left vs. right to flat out good vs. evil, democracy vs. fascism. So how do we break free of our silos, from the complacency of the familiar?

We take our cues from the water. It is eternal, primordial, our very lifeblood. It ebbs and flows, rages and returns to stillness. Do we have the courage to surrender to the completion of the old way of being, the old paradigm of duality, and allow a new, unified field to emerge? Mercury is conjunct Venus in Aries today, the planets of mind and heart embracing in the house of I Am. Can we embrace who we are, can we allow for the differences between us to no longer divide us, but rather to unify us into a more vibrant whole? Allowing the metamorphosis, rather than shackling ourselves to the death throes of extinction, is the choice at hand. Are we awakened enough to allow ourselves to evolve? I have been treading water lately, afraid to stop what I know because I fear I will once again go under, forgetting that I can also align myself with the current, and allow myself to be carried once again to the distant and beckoning shore. Perhaps the choice is no longer sink or swim, but rather float and flourish.

Blessed be.