It’s important to me to celebrate the days that mark the changing of the seasons. Solstices, Equinoxes, and the cross quarter days between them, signal a time to remember the ancient tides of our ancestors, tides that still herald the rise and fall of archetypal changes, the dance of dark and light, earth and heaven, feminine and masculine.

But this year, on the longest day and shortest night, I am buckled in a seat, 7 miles high, flying from London to China.

I’ve just watched a movie called Worlds Apart, a love story set in modern day Greece, with its background of refugee crisis and economic collapse. It showed the rage and terror that people face daily, yet beautifully wove in the everlasting theme of Eros, the god of love.

I am reminded that the forces of creation and destruction are always happening simultaneously. Sophocles himself would have applauded it was so good.

I check my flight tracker and smile at the irony that I have just flown over Athens. Coming up ahead on my flight path, I see names that I read about every day: Aleppo, Mosul, Baghdad, Kabul, Tehran.

I know about these places, but have never touched ground there. Like the Greek sun god, Helios, who shines so brightly today, I see it all from my distant perch. Helios alone sees the larger picture, but he can be so out of touch with the realities below him.

So it is that the love of power rules from a distance over the earth, seeing, but not experiencing the daily struggles down below.

Our rulers sell weapons, pass laws, and make decisions, out of touch with their potentially catastrophic effects on individuals and our future.

But I take heart with the cycles of the seasons. Even as we face the onslaught of heat waves in the dawning summer, I know that this cycle is at its peak, and will diminish from this day forward. Underneath a new order is emerging, and it is unstoppable.

Having studied the deep cycles of history, I know we are at the end of an era that has served its purpose, and are witnessing its decline. It brought us the coordination and technology to become a planetary civilization. The capacity to produce the tools of global transportation and communication devices created a global society where diversity is the norm, and innovation is exponential.

As I travel about I still see a world of individuals, struggling with their wounds and trying to fulfill their desires. Too few of them see, or even contemplate, the evolutionary arc of what we are becoming—together.

This day asks that we look at the bigger picture—as a global society struggling to grow up and to wake up. It asks that we take ourselves high and look far and wide, but also stay in touch with ourselves, each other, and the land we live upon.

Kabul is now behind me on my journey as the plane passes over northern India. I am reminded that war will one day become a relic of the past, and that the pursuit of higher consciousness is eternal.

The values of the chakras, which I am flying to China to teach, are what we need to reclaim to build a world that works: the values of Nature, Pleasure, Power, Love, Truth, Beauty, and the Divine. This is the map I follow, even as the worldly map goes by beneath me. For it is only with a good map that we can truly navigate where we’re going.

Bright Blessings,
Anodea Judith 

6.20.2017