Death is not extinguishing the light. it is putting out the lamp because dawn has come…..
Faith is the bird that feels the dawn breaking and sings while it is still dark…..
Rabindranath Tagore
The child in me remembers my father telling my brother and I that we were going on an adventure at dawn. That night I barely slept for excitement. Every hour or two I would wake up in a rush and reach for the alarm clock to see how close dawn was and then flop back dejected to find the time was crawling by and it wasn’t even midnight yet..
Sometimes i made so much noise that i woke my brother in the bed next to me and we would start talking about what the adventure might be and get ourselves so excited again it was hard to sleep. Every so often the voice of one of my parents would call out from the living room - ‘Pipe down in there. Go to sleep!’. So we would drop our voices to a whisper, nudging each other, full of healthy mischief and hungry for adventure.
And then it really was dawn……
My journey in life followed the same pattern. Some powerful force calling me, then calling through me to wake, wake and again wake. A spiritual instinct that there was something I, we were supposed to do, be, experience, express, manifest. A divine discontent, a restless rolling about in a mesh of sychronicities, lucid dreams and half remembered soul longings that took me again and again to the well of remembering. Or out into my life bothering my friends, family and random acquaintances, dragging them off into the kitchen at parties or out under the stars to ‘really’ talk or sit in ceremony, or do something dangerous. Where is the adventure! Gradually I learned to find my tribe - the other restless ones, troubled by a deep soul calling. Edge dwellers, the mountain climbers of spirit, the void bungy jumpers, the poets, yogis, magicians and fools. The priestesses, sacred prostitutes, wild dancers and irrepressible lovers of the divine. Some of them made it through the scythe and threshing floor of earth civilisation. Many did not. I bless them all and every crazy dance move our souls made trying to truly live the authentic life we all felt at our core. Through the decades since the sixties we nudged each other, kindling the fire of excitement while the voices of the world’s parents ( often just squashed children ) nagged us to get a job, mortgage and go back to sleep.
This dynamic tension between the world the way that it is and the world that we know and taste and belong to in the depth of our being - is the wheel, the rack that breaks or liberates a human soul. If you bring forth what is within you it will save you. If you do not it will destroy you - sez old Tomas. And so it is, not just for each of us but for the whole busload of humanity heading straight for the edge of the cliff between civilisations. It is Now and now we remember, this tribe of troubled shamans, the wanderers, hippies, visionaries and renegades - what we suffered for, struggled to birth with our poetry, music and organic veggies. We came for this. We are the imaginal cells, the mutatable ones, the ninjas on the frothy edge of evolution, leaping from the wave of a civilisation well past its use-by date into an unknown future that unfolds itself moment to moment out of the ecstasy of our daring.
I am a fire rooster and its part of my function to crow just before the dawn breaks. To penetrate the darkest hours when the night lies like a thick blanket all around - with the strident cries of the invincibility of spirit and the certainty of sunrise. It has taken my sixty turns around the sun, the time between fire rooster years to perfect the timing of my crow. Fire roosters are brave, visionary, irrepressible and creative. They can also be vain, prideful and well….cocky. Check, check and check. Because the rooster crow is linked to sunrise the bird can fool itself that it causes the event and wake everyone up in the middle of the night.
Back in the nineties, I wrote a book on the spiritual destiny of my country, NZ, then travelled the land with a huge alpine horn blowing it on every mountain and hill I could find and giving workshops to gather the tribe and inspire in them that the millennium was an opportunity for the sunrise we could all feel singing deep in our blood. With others, I grounded a temple/mystery school which we held on the physical plane for three years out of pure will and sacrifice. But the dawn did not come. In fact as Leonard Cohen sang this year before his own lamp went out, it seemed “You Want it Darker’. It seemed I was a premature exclaimator.
Another memory from childhood arises - we went on a rafting trip and stayed at a country house that a farmer we met on the road invited us to. We slept outside in a shed and about 2 in the morning a rooster started crowing and went on for about an hour. Suddenly the night was blasted by the sound of a double barrel shotgun fired out of the farmer’s window. No more crowing. I think every rooster has felt the V of the gunsights from time to time. But the fire rooster is also the phoenix that rises from the ashes and that cry of spirit is irrepressible. Sixteen years later, the seeds that were planted back then are sprouting and greening. There are roots finally appearing and the manifesting magic has an effortless quality that calls forth exactly what it needs from the world around. The mystery school/temple is anchoring again amongst those same stones where we knelt and cried out for revelation and tried to force a sun still well below the horizon to rise in response to our audacity.
There does come a time, as the archetype ripens, when the crowing is not instigated by the rooster. The quality of the whole experience shifts. It is the sun itself, lifting towards the eastern horizon that calls forth the crow in the same way it raises lingams all over the world, quickening the sap in all things. Such a time is upon us now. The sun of a new civilisation is dawning right here amidst the wreckage and despair of the old.. Right now as we pass through those dark hours where the suicide rate peaks and bodies roll restlessly in the tangled sheets of the economic and environmental consequences of spiritual sleep. Right now while the promoters of old software, already obsolete, start their final strident marketing campaign. Right now the while war machines gear up and more walls are being built than ever before. Right now while the orcs pour out of the ground and the screen sirens all want you to play the reality tv version of life on earth. Look to the East Beloved! Look to the East! The light, the light the irrepressible light is coming! i know for I am a fire rooster and this is my year and I was born for this crow, this cry. And you don’t have to believe me. You already know that it’s true. I am reminding you of what is already….. really…... happening ; drawing your attention to the dawning and away from the dark imaginings of the night. You can feel the singing deep in the blood. You can feel the surge in the heart amidst all the uncertainty and worry of the mind. Throw back the covers, blow the horn, ride out….ride out!
All over the planet brave souls are already busy preparing breakfast and laying the foundation for a new world. They are, we are... the green shoots cracking through the grey pavement, the inappropriate laughter at a funeral; that one wild night when you walked out the door of your old life and never came back. And we are coming together, finding each other, riffing off each other’s moves, magic and music. We are that which must be brought forth. We are the saving force. We ride the tigers of uncertainty and harness the dragon power of earth. Our strength is unstoppable for it is not based on mutual survival pacts or trade or politics.
It is based on the undeniable fact that we ARE each other, are FOR each other and the ecstasy of our union is a contagious wild fire of freedom.
We are the fire roosters This is our year. We are awake…..And we are ….
Aroused
We who stand up for love
are the pink bits
the erogenous zones
the erectile tissue of humanity
the rush we feel
is the passionate blood
of a second coming
lifting us swollen with the
sap of freedom
into an ecstatic cosmic embrace
we stand and crow, naked
vulnerable and unafraid
for we rise on an invincible tide
we are the first rosy blush
of an awakened earth
aroused and ready for the ride