Namaste Friends,

We are camping again-4th time out this year. This time we are out for two full weeks! Our campsite is far enough to get away from the noise and hustle of the city, but close enough that we can still drive in to work as needed.  I was telling my mom the other day that I can totally feel a difference in my energy when the majority of my day is spent outside in the quiet looking at blue skies, clouds, stars, lakes, hundreds of trees and tons of wildlife; unbridled nature rejuvenates my soul. No sirens, no billboards, no traffic, no technology, no concrete and very few distractions-my nervous system instantly goes into parasympathetic or rest and digest mode. I don’t remember where I read this, but I remember this line distinctly-“One doesn’t go out into nature, we are nature.”  When we visit the wild places of earth, we remember a part of ourselves that gets lost in the fray of life.

Its this lost or forgotten part of ourselves that we desperately need to bring back into our awareness. In the Taoist tradition, they call it Wu Wei– pronounced “woo way”. It is where we get the term “wooey” as in “She likes all that spiritual wooey stuff”.

One of my favorite philosophers of all time is Alan Watts-he had an elegantly cheeky style like only a Brit can do, yet he was deeply profound and his insights poked holes into the fabric of some of our misaligned cultural norms-particularly our overzealous, puritanical indoctrination. He often wrote on the“nature” of things-This is a quote from his Three Theories of Nature-Letters from his Collected Works:

“Nature — human nature included — is an organism, and an organism is a system of orderly anarchy. There is no boss in it, but it gets along by being left alone and being allowed to do its stuff. That’s what the Chinese Taoist philosophy calls wu wei (無爲), which means — not ‘doing nothing’ — but ‘not interfering with the course of events.’ Not acting against the grain.”

In other words, Wu Wei is going with the natural flow of things. Take a river for example-the snow melts, it fills the alpine lakes and they overflow and the excess water finds the easiest pathway down the mountain forming the river bed, water falls, etc…ultimately heading toward the oceans. That is the natural flow of things.

When we are wooey, we too follow the natural flow of life-its called following our intuition.

Trusting our intuition to guide us down the mountain of life is essential to our preservation. Earth is resilient. She will regenerate herself long after we are gone. But she is depleted right now and she is trying to show us that we are not living in Wu Wei. We are interfering with the course of events and acting against the grain.

If we annihilate ourselves due to our selfish greed and our power struggles, the world will go on regardless. New life will begin and our human species will sink like those of Atlantis and Lemuria before us.

My son Bo called us up last week and said we must see the new Christopher Nolan film The Odyssey. He said it was his new all time favorite movie and it really made him think about life. Michael and I rarely go to the movies, but with an endorsement like that-plus it was one of my favorite epic novels that I taught when I was a high school Language Arts teacher-and we are camping in 100 degree heat-so we decided to go see the 3 hour movie in the air conditioned theatre.

It did not disappoint. Homer’s tale of Odysseus’s great odyssey took place around 1200 BCE-near the end of the Bronze age-and entering the Iron Age, the human race was quickly falling into a denser consciousness of greed and selfishness. Large armies came into power, as did dictators and emperors. Our appetite for material wealth and prestige became ravenous and debaucherous. Instead of little kingdoms of pleasant communities doting the landscape, society burgeoned into empires of densely populated city-states that kept their citizens in a more or less police state of government. This is really the beginning of the dark times for humanity.

The yogis call this time the Kali Yuga, and we have been saturated in this mentality for a long time. In the story, the darkness came because people fell away from “Zeus’ Law”-which is to treat each other as you would want to be treated yourself. This is similar to the Golden Rule in the Bible-Do unto others as you would have done unto yourself.

Fast forward to today. The globe is divided into large armies, with a dictator or oligarchy on every major continent, the world is on fire-literally and figuratively, and humanity is interfering with the course of events and acting against the grain. We are not in Wu Wei!

The Golden Rule and Zeus’s Law are hanging on by a thread in our collective memory and behavior. As we have evolved in our taste for comfort and convenience, we have descended in our spiritual consciousness.

We have forgotten to be in integrity with the natural rhythm and flow of things.

We have forgotten the Wu Wei.

The good news is most scholars agree that we are in an evolutionary upswing! Yes! Believe it or not, things are looking up! Ever since we crossed the Galactic plane, cresting north of it for the first time in 13,000 years on the winter solstice in 2012, we have been in what the yogis call ascending Dwerpa Yuga, which is the next evolution of consciousness that arises out of the ashes of the Dark Kali Yuga– where we have been in for the last 4,000+ years. (Remember the 2012 Mayan prediction everyone talked about-this is it, but they never said it was the end of all time; they said it was a crossing into a new existence). Give it a beat, we are only 14 years into a new era, it takes a minute to turn big ships around. Soon we will feel the full steam ahead toward better ways and brighter days.

Right now humanity has a golden chance to create a new way to live full and purposeful lives together in a peaceful and loving environment. We have the perfect storm-we have crossed the galactic plane, which gives us a shift into higher realms of consciousness; old patriarchal remnants of the Iron Age systems and infrastructures are finally dissolving and crumbling; and, there are many of us seeking this higher ground-we want peace and harmony-so we can employ the 100th Monkey Theory. This is the theory that there is critical mass tipping point-that if enough of us start behaving in a thoughtful and loving way it, this behavior will transform unilaterally to everyone simultaneously, and we all upgrade into a higher state of awareness and understanding. I believe this is possible. According to the yogic philosophy all of this “reality” we live in is actually an illlusion, called Maya. That our collective consciousness has created this world-much like our consciousness creates our dreams. So if we want to shift our reality, we can imagine it together, and once the “100th Monkey” makes the shift- it will all shift.

At at the current moment the stars have aligned and the portals are open for transformation and evolution-No, for reals!–read Michael’s astrology report this month. Portals are opening and opportunity for cosmic upleveling is abundant!

Now is time to get your wooey on.

Sing your heartsong every day.

Meditate with your Spirit Guides. Listen to your intuition.

Broaden your lens of perception.

Create unabashedly from your unknown wilds.

Sit in nature and observe the “orderly anarchy in all organisms”.

Make good medicines. Eat whole foods. Respect Water.

Speak only truth. Pray to Spirit. Laugh Everyday.

Be Generous. Plant a garden. Talk to the Elementals.

Bang your drums. Show your Gratitude. Practice your Magic.

Dance your little tushy off. Help people thrive. Smile at strangers.

Love intentionally and without conditions. Donate your services. Don’t worry about money. Collect stones, feathers, and bones. Offer up ceremony. Swim naked. Play with children. Listen to the Elderly. Take long walks. Hold hands. Kiss Goodnight. Hug everyone. Live in the present moment. Forgive easily. Remember your True Self. Read Tarot. Study Astrology. Make time for tea. Breath deeply. Move your body. Call your friends. Gather in Community. Be Wooey!

Remember, Love is the natural flow of your soul. This is Wu Wei. This is Zeus’s Law. This is the Golden Rule. This is the next Evolution of our species.

Humanity’s shift into the next age is upon us whether we like it or not. Skepticism and pessimism will only pollute the synergy that is available to us. Resisting the flow of this next evolute will bring on strife and struggle, and although the times ahead will inevitably have chaos and swirl and uncertainty, it is all part of our transition into greater realms of existence. So try not to go against the grain, as Alan Watts cautioned, instead find your like-minded community of family and friends and use the strength of your tribe to help stabilize our journey into a more harmonious, purposeful, abundant and joyful life for all.

In the end of The Odyssey, Odysseus has the great realization that by breaking Zeus’s Law, he brought upon his own negative karma, not only to him, but to society, and he finds his way back home because he makes a choice to live in accordance with Wu Wei. (This isn’t a spoiler alert because you should have read the book in high school when your Language Arts teacher assigned it).

I will leave you with one final quote from Sir Alan Watts (who I believe should have been knighted by the queen, but never was):

“Man is as much attached to nature as a tree, and though he walks freely on two legs and is not rooted in the soil, he is by no means a self-sufficient, self-moving, and self-directing entity. For his life, he depends absolutely on the same factors as the tree, the worm, and the fly, on the universal powers of nature, life, God, or whatever it may be. From some mysterious source life flows through him unceasingly; it does not just go in at birth and come out at death—he is the channel for an ever moving stream, a stream that carries the blood through his veins, that moves his lungs and brings him air to breathe, that raises his food from the earth and bears the light of the sun to his face. If we look into a single cell of his body we find the universe, for sun, moon, and stars are ceaselessly maintaining it; we find it again if we plumb into the depths of his mind, for there are all the archaic urges of primeval life, both human and animal, and could we look deeper we might find kinship with the plants and rocks.”

Happy Lammas!

I hope to break bread with you at our community gathering on August 1st!

Much love,

Katrina