Spring Equinox 2023 Seasonal Cosmic Weather Forecast

Spring is a potent time to reconnect with the seeds of change and creativity. Spring is the time for expansion and inspiration. Inspiration literally means to breathe in! From the Latin inspirare, meaning the “immediate influence of God or a god”.

At this time of year, which is the astrological New Year, we are always offered the chance of a new beginning. We are given fresh opportunities to create and welcome change into our lives.

To read about the origins of the Spiritual Festival of the Spring Equinox thousands of years ago, read our article entitled Spring Equinox Mysteries and History.

The Spring Equinox, is the perfect time to participate in The Archangel Raphael Meditation.

The Feast of Archangel Raphael, who is the Guide and Protector of new plant growth and of human healers, and who presides over the Spring Season, occurs at approximately the same time as the Equinox.

This powerful meditation will connect you to Raphael, and to the nature Spirits who are awakening and quickening plant life at this sacred time of year.

Archangel Raphael and his legions of mercurial angels traverse the myriad dimensions of the multiverse, and preside over the mystic arts of healing through all five senses, and through the power of Higher Mind articulated in the Word that is a winged seed, symbolized by the Ace of Disks in the Tarot Deck.

These angels reside in the sephiroth Hod on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, which is the abode of Mercury. Raphael carries the winged caduceus, a staff surrounded by intertwined snakes, representing the spinal column and the other two subtle channels in the human being through which kundalini energy flows, and rises to the thousand petaled lotus at the crown of the head.

Daffodils in Bloom, Reynolda Gardens, Winston Salem, North Carolina, photo by Curtis Lang
 

As we approach the transition to Spring, February and early March have precipitated chaotic, unexpected extreme weather events throughout the world and across our country.

By the last week of February, temperatures in India reached over 102º, some 17º above normal. There is no spring season in India, this year or last, when scorching spring temperatures scalded India and Pakistan.

Europe has been experiencing  an extreme winter heatwave that began in January.

There is little or no snow in the Alps this winter. The world's most prominent skiers penned an open letter to the International Ski and Snowboard Federation saying “The seasons have shifted. Our sport is threatened existentially.”

Italy faces another drought alert, as the canals in Venice are running dry.

Meanwhile in the US, we've had:

Late February snowstorms in Southern California.

Blizzards last week in Lake Tahoe.

Heatwaves engulfing the Southeast.

Mid-80s here in North Carolina, where our average February temperature is 57 degrees.

Record low ice in the Great Lakes during the peak of winter.

A NASA satellite image taken on February 13 shows just around 7% of the Great Lakes are covered in ice -- significantly lower than average for this time of year.
 

Plants are blooming earlier than normal throughout the Southern and Eastern United States. Record warmth in February triggers consequences throughout the entire ecosystem.

Here In Winston Salem, when we went to check on our gardens in mid February, spring peepers inhabiting the creeks nearby in the woods made a surprisingly intense racket, a good month sooner than normal. Across town, early blooming cherry trees dot the landscape. 

Now, on St. Patrick's day, all the deciduous trees are budding out, but it's still too early to plant seeds in local gardens. We've had several lows in the twenties already in March, and meteorologists predict a few more hard freezes to come.

Fruit farmers and gardeners who planted early are keeping row covers in place.

The evolution of temperature during the Holocene era and some of the key mechanisms responsible for the increase in temperature over the last 12,000 years.  
Rutgers University. Credit: Samantha Bova

As accelerating climate change dislocates the regularity of the temperatures and weather patterns occurring during the four quadrants of the yearly seasonal wheel of life, plant life has difficulty adapting to the unusual conditions. 

For the last 12,000 years, during the Holocene era which saw the birth of human agriculture and civilization, average global temperatures were remarkably stable, varying by only a degree or two per decade. This stability underpinned the smooth flow of seasonal climate conditions that made widespread large scale agriculture possible. 

As we continue our collective exit from the 12,000 year long Holocene period of stable seasons, manageable yearly changes in high and low temperatures, and predictable yearly rainfall sufficient to produce enough food for billions of human beings around the world, the fate of our global civilization hangs in the balance.

Can we reduce humanity's carbon footprint in time to prevent runaway global climate change?

Around the world, governments have entered into a series of good faith agreements designed to reduce the rapid accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and to mitigate accelerating climate change.

But there is no mechanism to hold nations accountable if they fail to keep their promises to reduce carbon emissions.

In 2022, global carbon emissions hit another record high, according to data from the World Economic Forum. Despite empty promises by nations around the world, we have continued to set new records for carbon emissions more or less continuously since the 1990s. 

Clearly the multi-national climate agreements have not begun to solve the problem after decades of highly publicized broken promises. 

That's a shame, because no matter what measures we take as individuals, as communities, or as a nation, without international cooperation and enforceable climate change mitigation measures commensurate to this global emergency, our 21st Century Hydrocarbon Civilization is simply doomed.

Photo by Bob Osias on Unsplash
 

Here in the United States, we are relying on the conversion of some 291 million cars from fossil fuel engines to electric motors as the linchpin of our climate change mitigation strategy. Globally there are 1.44 billion cars in operation today, and that does not include vast fleets of fossil fueled trucks and buses.

Unfortunately, the lithium ion batteries in these cars are wildly inefficient. Low range electric vehicles use batteries weighing nearly 1000 pounds and new long range Teslas are projected to use 1800 pound batteries. 

These massive batteries are built around lithium, require rare earths like neodymium and dysprosium, and also utilize manganese, cobalt, graphite, steel, copper and nickel. 

Just to create 100 million Electric Vehicles (EVs) would require 8.3 million tons of copper, 5.2 million tons of graphite, and 600,000 tons of lithium.

Typical environmental impacts from copper mining include: severe impacts to drinking water aquifers, contamination of farmland, contamination and loss of fish and wildlife and their habitat, and risks to public health, just to name a few.

The US Geological Survey reports 2021 production from all the world’s copper mines was 21,000,000 tons. So to supply 100 million EVs by 2032, in 10 years existing and new copper mines would have to be producing another 8.3 million tons. This is the equivalent production of Chile and Peru, the top two copper producers, combined, plus Canada’s 590 million tons. 

That's not including the massive amounts of copper required for the charging platforms for the EVs worldwide. 

The world supply of available copper will flip into a deficit as early as 2025, according to a recent Bank of America report.

According to the US Geological Survey, output has increased in response to strong demand from the lithium battery market and increased prices. But to power 100 million batteries for EVs would require 6X the amount of lithium currently being mined.

Aerial view of the Beauvoir kaolin / lithium quarry in Échassières

Lithium mining is a dirty, dirty business, with very damaging environmental consequences, including, but not limited to: soil degradation, water shortages, biodiversity loss, damage to ecosystem functions and an increase in global warming.

Huge "sacrifice zones" in America, Africa, South America and other areas would be required to even begin to meet demand for EVs and their new infrastructure in the very near future.
  Given the scale of new mining and manufacturing involved in the conversion of the world's fleet of fossil fueled vehicles to EVs, and to construct new charging platforms and smart electrical energy grids all over the world, it's easy to foresee supply shortages and sharp global competition for these relatively scarce materials.

The race to electrify our global transportation system could very easily trigger resource wars among the world's major military powers, especially in Africa, Australia, and South America where many of these materials are currently mined.

Not to mention the global environmental impact from overly hasty resource extraction in a situation of heated global competition when every nation will be tempted to simply ignore the dramatic environmental degradation fast, intensive mining requires.

So maybe junking 1.44 billion existing automobiles and then building 1.44 billion new EV automobiles, plus a global charging platform plus a new smart power grid, is not a very good solution to our climate change emergency.
 

“If the policies, institutions, and spending patterns that shaped our existing car dependent infrastructure and built environment change, then alternative modes of transportation can be made far safer, far more convenient, and faster than cars – and immensely more pleasant and fun,” says economist and urban policy researcher Kira McDonald, co-author of a recent report entitled Achieving Zero Emission Transportation With More Mobility and Less Mining.

We all know that the magic of the American marketplace will never favor investment in public transportation. There are too many sunk costs in the current highway system, far flung suburban housing, and automobile manufacturing.

Nor has the government shown any inclination to build out a new public transportation system. Since the onset of the global pandemic in 2020, the number of people using public transportation has plummeted across the country. 

"New York’s subway system has regained about two-thirds of its pre-pandemic ridership with about 91 million trips in November, according to the MTA. But that is about 50 million fewer rides than in November 2019. Officials worry usage has stalled out at that level," according to a January 2023 report in The Wall Street Journal.

"In San Francisco, the Bay Area Rapid Transit, or BART, recorded 3.7 million trips in November—a little more than one-third of the ridership before Covid."

"In the U.S. overall, there were 883 million fewer public-transit trips in the third quarter of 2022 compared with the same period in 2019, according to federal data gathered by the American Public Transportation Association."

The reduced use of public transit is putting tremendous financial pressure on existing systems, as Covid era federal funds for public transit are set to terminate.

So rather than ramping up public transit, America's public transit systems are in acute crisis, and there are no credible plans to create a new, clean energy public transportation infrastructure.

That's a shame, because as we shall see from a rather superficial look at the economics of vehicle electrification, and the lack of raw material required for an electrified coast-to-coast transportation system, the current US policy is doomed to failure. 

Photo by Nate Johnston on Unsplash

America cannot continue to prioritize the primacy of an automobile centric transportation system. Nor can we allow automakers, mining companies, and utility companies intent on maximizing profits without concern for environmental degradation or geopolitical risks of resource wars to continue to dominate our country's transportation network. 

If we continue on our present course, the consequences for the environment will be dire and resource wars around the world will certainly be ignited.

But Americans seem determined to attempt to maintain as much of their current profligate, destructive, environmentally disastrous lifestyles as possible.

American shareholders want to insure a steady flow of record profits from the current American transnational mega-corporations that have been successfully rendering our ecosystems unfit for human habitation for the last 75 years.

America's investing class knows that pursuit of an electrified national transportation system will require a muscular military response as global competition for critical resources heats up in the near future. That's fine with them.

Disaster capitalism and war profiteering will go hand in hand under America's current energy strategy. The race to prepare for the upcoming resource wars is already underway in the capitals of major military powers worldwide.

Navy Jets, Photo by Weston Eichner on Unsplash

As I write these words, alarms are being sounded in corporate suites and political offices in America and China as it becomes all too apparent that the world faces imminent critical shortages in the basic raw materials required to electrify the global vehicular fleet.

America relies on imports for most of the key resources involved in every stage of the electrification of energy and transport systems, including rare earths like neodymium, lithium, cobalt, graphite, sulfide nickel for batteries, and copper for just about everything involved in the construction of new smart grids, charging platforms and EVs.

China, on the other hand, has been cornering the markets for these crucial materials in every way possible over the last decade, while America has focused on failed wars in the Middle East and an obviously unwinnable proxy war in Ukraine against Russia, owner of the world's largest nuclear arsenal, equipped with cutting edge hypersonic weapons.

Hypersonic Weapons Travel at 5X Speed of Sound, Making Detection and Interception 
of Incoming Objects Extremely Problematic

Since 2010 China has cornered the global rare earths markets, and has locked up supplies & processing capabilities for nickel, cobalt, graphite and lithium. Chinese mines contain 85% of the world's neodymium. China's partner Russia controls the vast majority of the world's palladium and nickel, used in catalytic converters and stainless steel.

A close look at simple mathematics of the supply side situation reveals that the Biden administration's clean energy through electrification strategy cannot possibly be implemented without massive increases of imports of key resources, and that those increased imports depend upon the goodwill of Biden's Chinese and Russian counterparts. 

America does not look set to win Cold War 2.0, which is another reason why, although the path to and through any new 21st Century conflicts between major military powers is shrouded in the "fog of war", the danger of hot resource wars among major powers will only escalate in the years to come.

Globally, China is also the leader in vehicle electrification, but countries around the world are racing to install new charging platforms and electrification grids.

"Currently, EVs only account for 2.6% of global car sales and about 1% of the global car stock in 2019," according to a corporate analysis by Virta, the fastest growing vehicle charging platform in Europe. "Until 15% of the vehicles on the road go electric, there won’t be any real impact on the grid. That level of uptake isn’t predicted to happen until 2035, according to a Bloomberg New Energy Finance report."

"According to best estimates, growth in EV adoption could drive a 300-fold increase in electricity consumption by 2040, compared to 2016," reports Thomson Reuters news agency.

Where will all that electricity come from?

As we've reported in previous newsletters it would cost somewhere around $2-4 trillion to upgrade America's ancient, decaying electrical grid to a modern 21st Century smart grid that would be capable of receiving, storing and distributing electricity derived mainly from renewable resources.

It will cost trillions more to create the wind, solar, and geothermal energy infrastructure to feed that insatiable smart grid.

Imagine the global cost for that upgrade! 
 

Obviously, if we are to avoid collapse of our global hydrocarbon based civilization the world has to move at warp speed away from using fossil fuels to generate electricity and toward renewables. But we are moving in the opposite direction in many ways.

China, which currently is responsible for about 50% of the world's coal production and consumption, has just approved the largest expansion of coal fueled power plants in years.

So much for China's pledge at the 2021 Glasgow COP26 global climate summit to reduce the use of coal to generate electricity, and for other purposes. These pledges are simply public relations exercises, since there is no authority capable of enforcing the agreements.

At that same Glasgow climate summit, India also pledged to "phase down" its use of coal. This legalese actually means that India pledged to reduce the proportion of its total energy usage supplied by coal. But since India's energy usage is skyrocketing, the actual use of coal will increase dramatically.

India says it will increase its production of coal from 700 million tons in the current fiscal year to 1 billion tons in 2024 to help meet increasing demand for electricity, as reported by investment analyst Jim Jubak, in his newsletter for global investors.

"India is still connecting millions of remote homes to the power grid and, over the next two decades, expects to add as much new power generation as the amount now used by the entire European Union, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency," says Jubak.

"Time to admit that we’re not going to rein in carbon emissions by 2030 or 2035 or even 2050?" Jubak asks wryly.

This brief look at the current global efforts to electrify the planet makes it crystal clear that without a global governance structure with the authority to enforce promises by nations and corporate actors to reduce carbon emissions, we are on a runaway train bound straight to climate hell.

Observing the evolution of Cold War 2.0 in the Ukraine, in Taiwan, and in areas of the world where vital resources required by electrification are exploited, it's also clear that without global negotiations followed by binding treaties to reduce carbon emissions, eliminate nuclear arms, protect national borders, and respect the environmental integrity of resource rich regions of the world, we have no hope of avoiding the onset of many low-intensity resource wars around the world.

Any of these conflicts could escalate into World War 3, a war that will ultimately be fought with nuclear weapons.

The United Nations is the best international agency available to host negotiations to set up binding resource management and climate change agreements, but it lacks the ability to enforce the results of various countries' pledges or agreements.

For that, we would need a truly one world government with power to enforce these agreements.

The notion of a one world government is extremely frightening to nationalists and empire builders of all political persuasions around the world, but some political agency or agencies must be enabled that have enough power to enforce binding climate pledges, peace negotiations, and treaties. Some agency must be empowered to adjudicate conflicts between major powers before they get out of control.
Global government must be the next step in humanity's political evolution, if we are to avoid regression into a Mad Max world of devolution, climate catastrophe and widespread resource wars. 

Nation states competing to obtain maximum benefits for their elites and maximum power in key spheres of influence world wide have not been able to bring lasting peace to our globalized world. Instead they are preparing to become "armed lifeboats" in a sea of chaos as the 21st Century unfolds.

Just as the advent of nation states around the 17th century enabled a new broader governmental entity to rein in the power of warring warlords, princes and principalities, resulting in tremendous gains in human education, technology and human rights, so today warring nation states must be governed by a transnational global power to avoid catastrophic warfare and enable the transition from hydrocarbon civilization to a renewable future.

Believe it or not it was 18th century Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant who first enunciated the idea that humanity would have to create a form of transnational governance to replace warring nation states, and Kant predicted that the driving force for this new global form of government would be nature herself.

In his essays "Perpetual Peace" and "Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose", Kant predicted the emergence of a global federation of republics that would bring an end to war. Kant wrote that "The great guarantee of perpetual peace is nothing less than that great artist, nature."

Kant believed that wars between nation states would be so damaging to the belligerents that eventually a world community of republics would emerge, with the ability to replace military conflict with negotiated settlements. This would put an end to what Kant called "predatory war" and lead to the "withering away" of nation states. The strong would no longer devour the weak, and by surrendering some of their sovereign power to a global federation, the people of the world would, paradoxically, discover true freedom.

Kant would have scoffed at the neo-liberal notion that the magic of the marketplace will facilitate the birth of a new post-Hydrocarbon civilization free of the curse of fossil fuels. Transnational corporations are finding ways to make profits from Disaster Capitalism. They have a short term orientation focused on maximizing profits today, and leaving their children's future out of their plans altogether.

Neither competing nation states nor predatory transnational corporations can enforce a regime of peaceful, environmentally friendly global governance.
The closest thing we have today to a global system of governance is the American financial system of dollar hegemony, run by the big banks and the Federal Reserve, which is controlled by the big banks rather than the federal government.

As we have seen in the last 45 years, governance by megabanks means financial globalization: the free movement of capital; restrictions on the freedom of working people; unlimited, virtually untaxed profits by the Lords of Capital, who can stash billions of dollars in offshore tax havens; a global race to the bottom eviscerating wages and labor rights; merciless exploitation of the resources of smaller countries around the world; privatization of national assets to enrich financiers and resource oligarchs and gunboat diplomacy to protect the international investments of the bankers and the wealthiest among us.

For the bankers and the 1%, the powers of the nation state represent restrictions they would like to transcend. Bankers, the top 1% of wealth holders and transnational corporations all chafe under the rules of the nation state, and abhor the very idea of global governance which they equate with communism and dictatorship.

They despise environmental regulations, rules and regulations designed to prohibit financial and corporate fraud, labor laws, and any and all restraints upon their ability to amass capital at any cost to the world at large.
That is why, ever since the rise of neoliberalism under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, Conservatives have attempted to curtail the powers of the national government and the United Nations, which has been vilified as the evil headquarters of a nascent One World Government that would create a New World Order that would strip Americans of their freedoms.

Growing up in Houston, my Father, who was an executive at Exxon, was an organizer for the John Birch Society, who had promoted the basic tenets of anti-communist military adventurism, neoliberalism, racism, states rights, anti-environmentalism, and corporate impunity since the Eisenhower administration.

I was told from grade school, long before Reagan's ascent, that Communists secretly controlled the federal government since the time of President Eisenhower, and that the United Nations was a Communist plot to take over the world.

The International Communist Conspiracy was to be confronted militarily everywhere in the world. By 1962, when I was 10 years old, China had forced the United States to a stalemate in Korea, and recently defeated India in a war in the Himalayas, so China represented a major threat to the United States. Things change all the time, but somehow during my lifetime, things seem to stay the same in geopolitics.
I can still recall my Father preparing me for a debate in middle school in Houston where I successfully convinced the audience in the plush auditorium, which included my classmates, the children of George H.W. Bush, and other Houston oil aristocracy, that we should immediately declare war on China and use nuclear weapons to remove the threat Communist China posed to America once and for all. I was applauded for my victory.

Of course, according to my father and his John Bircher friends, racial integration was also considered a Communist plot, which interfered with states rights. Environmentalists didn't really exist then, a decade before Earth Day, but the Birchers knew they were Communists too. 

For the Birchers, all federal powers except for a strong military required to maintain the global hydrocarbon fueled American Empire, and perhaps government subsidies for oil exploration and other activities of giant corporations, would devolve to individual states. This would be very convenient for racists, tax evaders, crooked bankers, and large corporations seeking to exploit workers and the environment as a whole.
Anyway, flash forward to 2023, and what had been considered the nutty right wing extremism of the John Birch Society and Barry Goldwater in the 1960s has become more or less the default setting for bipartisan neoliberal domestic economic policy and the bedrock of Republican Party dogma in America. And by the way the John Birch Society is still alive and well in Texas, and more popular than ever.

John Birch Society founder Robert W. Welch, Jr. was the originator of the late 20th century conspiracy theory model of Conservative politics. The John Birch Society taught that the world was secretly governed by an International Communist conspiracy of International Jewish Bankers, and shadowy members of the Illuminati who promoted a sinister One World Government.

That cabal featured the Rockefeller family as one of the most diabolical puppeteers, bent on forcing Americans into a new form of slavery.

I never quite understood how my Father, who worked for the Rockefeller owned oil company Exxon, could also claim the Rockefellers were basically in league with Stalin, Mao and probably Satan himself. But hey, this was the birthing of post-truth politics, and logic is and was just another unnecessary piece of Enlightenment baggage.

My Father used to say that America would not really be free until we had a King. Donald Trump has already applied for the job, so maybe we'll see the advent of a truly free America in our lifetimes.
The Republican Party is now officially the party of Donald Trump, and the party of a variety of Conspiracy Theories that would have bewildered the original John Birchers. But the John Birch agenda has, in large part, been enacted in America, beginning with Ronald Reagan, and continuing through today's endless right wing culture wars struggling to anoint white Protestant evangelicals with lots of guns as the only true Americans.

Deregulation, privatization, downsizing the federal government, states' rights, destruction of environmental regulations, and the continuous expansion of the American Empire through wars of choice throughout the world are pretty much business as usual  -- supported in large part by both American political parties. Robert W. Welch, Jr. would be delighted.

Any politician in America who advocated the establishment of the United Nations as an effective vessel of global governance would immediately be denounced by Republicans and Democrats alike as a lunatic at best, and a Communist tool of Putin and Xi Jinping, at worst.
If American politicians have anything to do with it, there will be no global government to oversee a peaceful transition to a new post-Hydrocarbon Civilization. Absent that government, there may not be much of a civilization left by the early 22nd Century.

Our leaders know this and they are preparing for the worst.

The specter of resource wars that could escalate into all out nuclear Armageddon in the short term will soon be eclipsed in a world that, by the 2070s, will see 3 billion climate refugees desperately seeking new homes in a world where all developed countries have become Armed Lifeboats, and even the most powerful countries, like America and China, will find it impossible to project power abroad. Global empires will go the way of the dinosaurs. 

"In a world that sees two meter sea level rise, with continued flooding ahead, it will take extraordinary effort for the United States, or indeed any country, to look beyond its own salvation," warns ex-CIA Director James Woolsey, Jr. "All of the ways in which human beings have dealt with natural disasters in the past … could come together in one conflagration: rage at government’s inability to deal with the abrupt and unpredictable crises; religious fervor, perhaps even a dramatic rise in millennial end-of-days cults; hostility and violence toward migrants and minority groups, at a time of demographic change and increased global migration; and intra- and interstate conflict over resources, particularly food and fresh water. Altruism and generosity would likely be blunted."

"Political adaptation presents stark choices," says Christian Parenti, in his 2011 book Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence. "There is a real risk that strong states with developed economies will succumb to a politics of xenophobia, racism, police repression, surveillance, and militarism and thus transform themselves into fortress societies while the rest of the world slips into collapse. By that course, developed economies would turn into neofascist islands of relative stability in a sea of chaos. But a world in climatological collapse—marked by hunger, disease, criminality, fanaticism, and violent social breakdown—will overwhelm the armed lifeboat. Eventually, all will sink into the same morass."

The long emergency of our Hydrocarbon Civilization has begun. It will continue long after we are all dead, along with our children and grandchildren. We still have time to bend the curve of history and avoid the worst possible outcomes.

People of goodwill around the world can demand an end to war, the elimination of nuclear weapons, and empowerment of the United Nations, the last best hope for a negotiated peaceful descent of our unsustainable global civilization. 

We can demand an end to the de facto rule of the banking elites, and the transformation of our financialized economy into a productive economy focused on creating the vast new infrastructure required for electrification of transportation systems. Of course we should tax the rich all over the world to support this effort, at rates approaching the 90% tax rate the wealthiest paid at the time Eisenhower was President.

Imagine if the world's military forces were repurposed to support the global energy transition. Imagine if the trillions of dollars a year spent on weapons and military bases could instead be spent on building the electrification infrastructure, retrofitting existing structures to use less precious energy, on creating more efficient public transit systems to replace our insane automobile centric culture, and on helping people in endangered areas of the country make a planned retreat from the coastal zones and fire prone areas most threatened by climate change.

Solar Panels, Photo by Andreas Gücklhorn on Unsplash

This is the scale of social and political transformation that is required to avert civilizational collapse.

You may say that's a hopeless task, because there are no large organizations and billionaire donors working toward these goals. But when my Father and his John Birch Society friends began organizing neighborhood by neighborhood in Texas in the 1960s, they were derided as right-wing kooks.

Now, 50 years later, they and their ideas control the Republican Party in Texas, and they have pushed the national Republican Party so far to the right that most of George Bush Jr.'s neoconservative war hawks, who spent trillions of dollars on the failed Iraq War through deceit and subterfuge, and created a surveillance state in America, have defected to the Democratic Party, because the Bushes have always been at war with their erstwhile right wing populist allies in the Birch Society and the MAGA millions.

Those in favor of enforceable global agreements to mitigate climate change could learn about how to organize from the techniques of the John Birchers.

My Father held regular meetings in our living room to educate people about the vast international Communist conspiracy. He had a trove of books he sold and loaned to his neighbors and friends stashed in closets in our house. He was active in the Republican Party in our precinct, and worked to get right-wing candidates nominated to local, state and national offices. He read tirelessly about current affairs all over the world, and was able to be a lecturer, mentor and friend to new recruits.

Now we can organize locally and globally at the same time. My Father and his friends did not have the benefit of a global Internet. In all organizing, networking is the name of the game.

We can all do our part to create a network of spiritual activists in our community and worldwide to elevate consciousness, change the narrative, and create political space for the kind of evolutionary transformation that can, even at this late date, birth a new post-hydrocarbon civilization that will rise from the ashes of our dying world order.

I know that many in the spiritual community people don't want to even read the news because that might create negative emotions and clutter their mind with disturbing thoughts. Once you decide to become an informed and active citizen of your community and your world, it's a big commitment. Going a step further and attempting to educate others about the scope of the current global emergency and its ramifications for your neighbors is a further difficult step to take.

For me, this newsletter is part of that effort, and part of my spiritual practice which my own Guides and Teachers have encouraged me to perform for many years. I think the time has come for spiritual activism to spread, not just by osmosis through the collective consciousness, but through the hard work of political organizing.

I think it is a sign of the times that author and spiritual activist Marianne Williamson has just announced her candidacy for President of the United States. As we shall see in the Cosmic Weather Forecast, spiritual activism and reverence for nature resonate with the energy signature of the entry of Saturn into Pisces this month, conjoining Neptune in Pisces.

Alanis Morrisette joins Marianne Williamson on stage
prior to Williamson's 2014 Congressional Campaign, 
Justin Higuchi from Los Angeles, CA, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

If the desire for world peace is strong within your heart, you might want to check out The Peace Alliance, an organization Marianne Williamson founded to promote peacebuilding throughout the world.

If you are a regular reader of these newsletters, you have a demonstrated interest in global affairs viewed from the perspective of spiritual activism, and most likely have enough awareness about our global climate emergency to be able to share a clear minded perspective with your neighbors and your associates. 

I would encourage you to seek intuitive spiritual guidance about whether your path might include helping to educate others about these difficult realities, and perhaps even to engage in some form of spiritual activism.

Connect with Higher Mind and Higher Self and ask your Guides and Teachers to provide you with golden opportunities to be of service in some way to help elevate the collective consciousness so we can mitigate the tremendous pain and suffering our present approach to climate change is inflicting on billions of people. 

If the path of spiritual activism resonates with you, please send your friends and associates a copy of our newsletter. We have published this newsletter for nearly twenty years, always as a love offering, never for money. It is our pleasure to reach a wider audience with our message of love, enlightened aspiration and undiminished hope for a sustainable future for humanity.

Jane in Bethabara Historical Park Community Garden, photo by Curtis Lang

On a personal, individual, local level, Jane and I have found that working in a community garden is a great way to connect with the web of life, the seasonal cycles and with other gardeners. We have found that gardening creates common ground, pun intended, and that the garden is a fertile space for networking and discussing environmental issues as well as the sharing of garden tips.

If you have the space and inclination, starting your own garden is also a fantastic way to expand your spiritual practice, to ground yourself in the gritty realities comprising the life cycles of the myriad garden creatures in the soil, in the air and in the water in your local environment.

Our spiritual practice often involves meditation, Reiki, energy work with crystals and other higher chakra activities and working in the garden in partnership with Nature is a great way to stay grounded and achieve a balance between Earth Ki and Heaven Ki, establishing a balanced flow of energy that supports and sustains us in these difficult times. 

In terms of the Big Picture, the time has come to think about what wisdom, beauty, technology and folkways can be secured and salvaged for future generations, protected from the maelstrom in the decades to come, regardless of our ability to effect meaningful positive political change in the world.

This is not the first civilization to collapse, and often the collapse is slower than expected. There is still time to act. There is still time for long term intergenerational planning by individual families. 

We will be discussing what that means in newsletters to come. 

Spiritually, we are all being forced to learn the Buddhist wisdom of the impermanence of all things, and the precarious, interdependent nature of all that exists in the phenomenal worlds. 

We can all come together as spiritual beings and stand together with our Guides and Teachers, and our allies in the Angelic and Elemental Kingdoms to raise the collective consciousness through group meditation, lightwork, rituals and connecting with nature. 

If you would like to participate in group meditations involving visualization and light work to elevate the collective consciousness of humanity, send us an email.

If we receive a positive response, Jane and I will make an effort to organize some rituals we can perform together to enhance the Love and Light in the world and to catalyze the collective consciousness and positive political change.

In newsletters to come, we will continue to explore the many paths available to respond with compassion and fortitude to the challenges we face individually and collectively in the 21st Century.

Meditation Moment: [In Just-] by e.e. cummings

in Just-

spring          when the world is mud-

luscious the little

lame balloonman


whistles          far          and wee


and eddieandbill come

running from marbles and

piracies and it's

spring


when the world is puddle-wonderful


the queer

old balloonman whistles

far          and             wee

and bettyandisbel come dancing


from hop-scotch and jump-rope and


it's

spring

and


         the


                  goat-footed


balloonMan          whistles

far

and

wee