christmas eve sunset (Photo credit: ztephen)

The waxing Gibbous Moon has already risen on this Christmas Eve and as the children count the hours until Santa’s visit and anxious parents calculate incomes and outgoings. The Mayan Calendar expectations leave us disappointed, triumphant, confused or calculating the next significant marker of time or perhaps reinterpreting what the calendar’s end really means. Some had hoped for the end of times and others just the end of our times and a new beginning but many share an impatience with the times we have; our being.

It is easy to poke fun at children’s impatience with mantras like “Are we there yet?” Or at our teenagers’ angst about  being “bored”  while all the time blocking any awareness in our frenzied pace to beat the clock on our way to the next task or relieved rest with cigarette, coffee, or glass in hand to soothe the furrowed brow or troubled soul. One thing we all share in common regardless of age or agenda is impatience with the now, anxiety of being present and desire to be elsewhere or feeling different. The human condition is an uneasy garb for most of us.

Is it not strange then or perhaps expected strange that all religions and non-religion persuasions invite and even demand entrance to the quiet now, and embrace of the anxiety whose meaning we would escape. Without exception religion and philosophy calls for a quieting of the mind, a breather from activity, even an awareness of our breath and breathing until we can appreciate that space in time where we are alone with our being.

Into our relatively calm lives uninvited many time crashes digital newsbites  of every form of violence and manifestation of this impatience we all share taking a life here, restoring life there, invading boundaries and imploding our own, desperate for an end and all the time afraid of the ending.

The poet/psalmist tells us in convincing verse that there is ” a time for everything under the sun ” and while nodding our agreement to sage advice few follow the invitation to come along the road to a quiet place. Walking may bring you to an unintended place or even get you lost but it will always lead you unerringly to a place of surprise and new beginnings.

Happy trails from Walkuforia.com

As the world celebrates the Mayan calendar, Solstice, Christmas and Kwanzaa, it feels fitting to mention what in my opinion is one of the King of Rums. Among their accomplishments, the ancient Maya not only invented step pyramids, a calendar of remarkable complexity they may also have had a hand in the creation of one of the world’s finest rums – Zacapa.

Created using the sweetest crushed virgin sugar cane honey and pure spring water collected from the ancient Mayan mountains and matured using the Solera ageing process a truly fine rum is created. The clever use of the palm leaf weave on every bottle references a time of the Maya in 1,400 B.C. Only Kings were entitled to use the woven palm leaf, known as a petate.  Made into floor-mats for their Kings it was believed that sitting on a ”petate” changes your whole view of the world and forces you to look at life with humility and to see things for what they are. So if you find yourself with unusual insight having sipped on a Zacapa 23 or perhaps an XO perhaps it is the energy and spirit of the ancient Maya speaking.

Seasons greetings

Sue

I wrote TICKETS in bold letters because if one was not connected to a female organizer from Merida ,or if one did not go to the conference that was being held  in Merida,then there was no chance that one could go to Uxmal and enter in the wee hours of the morning to witness the sunrise.

It is very rare indeed that there is a special opening of Uxmal but on this day there was.I was not impressed how it was handled…… why , I thought could not the local people have a special invitation to enter Uxmal on this, their day of inheritance . There is no way that these people would have had the monies to pay for a TICKET or any means of arriving there even if they wanted to.

I was told , well the Maya have dis connected themselves from their inheritance. But who’s fault is that I answered. Lack of communication , lack of respect for the local people, lack of education who knows?

But along come groups of new agers that somehow seem to know more of the Maya culture than anyone else……….. coming unread , unprepared and looking for some big wham bang experience and leaving disappointed because……….. nothing happened!!

One lady that passed by here for lunch ,was disappointed because she had it in her mind that she would be able to join a group and do a ceremony.  She did not encounter what she was looking for in Uxmal .But instead she quietly sat alone did her own thing and the things she revealed to me what had taken place she would never have had that experience if she had been with a group. Yes , Valerie you are right . I never looked at it in this way!!she said.

Walking your journey in life is a private thing and we all have our own experiences that we learn from….. simplicity in all is more powerful than showmanship….. and I noticed over this period of the end of the old and the beginning of the new era there have been more actors than normal! Even on this spiritual path you will find people who want to exhort monies from the visitors offering ceremonies of all kinds , teachings etc

How do I look upon this. In the past I spent so much money taking one course after another to increase my knowledge  ,which I must admit I learned much,then it began to be a who’s who’s and which book have you read and which course have you taken , who have you seen or not seen in person…. I began to realize that all the information all had the same basis in the end no matter how flowery the writer may have been.Some bringing information that was far beyond ridiculous.. but made a good seller!

So I quit classes ( told I was a spiritual rebel) and continued on my own journey which is really what we are supposed to do after the initial teachings.

To use tools to communicate really is only an aid that one thinks make things so much stronger……. do you really need them? Believe in your higher self , walk your talk,give thanks and look to the universal laws of existance then one need not look further.

And this is why I got in contact with Don Filipe a simple quite shaman from a small village to ask if he would come a do a cleansing for the people that were staying with me on the eve of the 20 and 21st .

There were no fireworks, no fanfares, just a gentleness in the air.

He arrived and we greeted as we walked back to the area where he choose to work. I took plants from the garden that he asked for , he prepared himself as did we.

Some decided not to attend .. why ? because it was just too simple, yet they came a far distance for the Maya experience.

I invited the staff to join us and were happy to do so , it is their tradition afterall.

After the cleansing the staff returned to carry out their days work as did I

.I thanked Don Filipe He ate breakfast then he left because he had to attend other people in the nearby town.

2012 was definitely a year of tumult. I won’t go into all the details but I will highlight one event in particular. First let me state, I never thought I would write a blog about fatherhood. But when Little A came a month early and spent a week in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, well, my inspiration found me.

Fortunately, my little man is doing very well and growing, and growing, and growing. Fatherhood is hands down the greatest adventure and journey any man can embark on. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. Regardless of the 2:30 am feedings; the dirty diapers (I didn’t think carrots could produce…that), and all the other little things too numerous to mention here.

So, as I sit and ponder my musings of the past year I am grateful for many things. Most important…family. The holidays are the most stressful time of the year for many. Yet, we easily lose sight of what the holidays are truly about. All the gadgets, the toys, mean nothing in the grand scheme of things. Family, friends, the people who make the characters in the story of our lives are the truly important things.

Let us all be grateful for what we have. Let us all keep in our minds and hearts those who have lost and those who are suffering this holiday season.

Happy Holidays to all.

Related articles

• Miscellaneous Musings (cweeds.wordpress.com)
• 2012 – The end of the Mayan Calendar. Not the end of the World! (travelwithsandra.wordpress.com)

But how have prehistoric cultures and do indigenous people from around the world count time and create calendars for planting and harvesting crops, or for planning important religious rituals? You can find this out by using the subject “ordering of time” in eHRAF World Cultures (http://ehrafworldcultures-beta.its.yale.edu) and eHRAF Archaeology (http://ehrafarchaeology.yale.edu). Contact hraf@yale.edu for a password with the subject line “Mayan calendar.”

Picture courtesy of Federal Government of the United States

Once again, the end of the world has failed to happen. It’s now after 21/12/2012 so I guess we’re safe – for now. These predictions are starting to get a bit old. Any number of raptures have failed to materialise (although the chap in charge of that prediction has gone quiet so maybe he went on his own).

There was even a film made specially for this occasion (“2012″), which was released early enough to ensure ample profits before the world blew up, and the end of the world still didn’t happen. Stupid lying film.

This latest prediction was based on the end of the Mayan calendar – actually the end of a 5125 year cycle. Did anyone not think that maybe the Mayans couldn’t count past 5125? Or that maybe the “end of the cycle” didn’t necessarily mean the “end of the world”?

What about all these people who devised ingenious means to stay alive? Do they really want to live all alone in a dead and ravaged world? It’ll be quieter and a lot less complicated, I suppose.

Merry Christmas!

I am not sure what this year will bring but I am ready and excited to see what amazing opportunities await…

Are you ready?

Mayan prophecy predicted the world would end on December 21, 2012.   And on the morning of December 21st, all signs pointed to the destruction of a large portion of the planet.  President Obama was safely hidden in the U.S. Apocalypse Bunker and NASA was doing everything it could to try to stop the inevitable.

Now that we’ve made it through the Mayan apocalypse, the scientific community is trying to determine exactly how we survived.  WWN has learned that the official reason why the planet was saved.   Bat Boy came to the rescue.

WWN always knew Bat Boy was special, but when we met with one of the leading scientists and “end-of-the-world” expert, Dr. Robert Zimkowski of NASA,  even we were surprised at how amazing this mutant is.

How did he do it?  Well, according to Dr. Zimkowski, NASA launched a rocket two months ago and it only had four being on it.  Three astronauts (two Americans and a Russian) and Bat Boy.  They rocket headed toward Nibiru, the planet that was hurtling toward Earth.  The Mayans had predicted the end-of-the-world, but they didn’t say how exactly it would end.  NASA knew all along that Nibiru would collide with Earth, thus destroying all of it.

So, the spaceship, affectionately known as Mutant 1, headed toward Nibiru.  The ship got as close as it could to Nibiru and then it launched a pod with Bat Boy in it.   Bat Boy, being half-bat, was the logical choice, because he could survive in the pod far longer than the other three astronauts.  Bat Boy then took the Pod close to Nibiru and fired a nuclear missile at it.   It was a suicide mission and Bat Boy knew it – but he wanted to save Earth.   The missile hit Nibiru in the precise spot NASA wanted and the planet broke into smithereens – with the fallout heading toward Venus, and away from Earth and our Moon.

Bat Boy then safely steered the pod back to Mutant 1 and… the rest is now history.    When the missile hit, the cheers from NASA personnel could be heard for miles.   NASA is hailing Bat Boy as the greatest astronaut that has ever lived.   President Obama will be hosting Bat Boy in Hawaii over Christmas and New Year’s and then he will invite Bat Boy to the White House to receive  the Medal of Honor.

The full story of how Bat Boy saved Earth, will be released by WWN in March 2013.   “The Bin Laden killing was a major historical event, but Bat Boy saving the planet from Armageddon could well be one of the greatest events in human (and bat) history.

 . By T.V. Antony Raj

.

At sunrise on Friday, December 21, 2012, an era in the Long Count calendar of the Maya came to an end. Many different groups of people around the world expected the end of days catastrophes, and the dawn of a new, more spiritual era. However, the world did not end on that day as expected.

Now I know why!

Photo: REUTERS/Mariana Bazo

On December 20, 2012, at a beach in Lima, Peruvian shamans performed a ritual to prevent the end of the world. The shamans performed several rituals to ward off the forces that would bring about the end of the world.

Should not we thank these Peruvian Shamans for keeping us all alive today?

.

RELATED ARTICLES

• After Mayan Apocalypse Failure, Believers May Suffer (vineoflife.net)
• December 21, 2012: YIPEE! THE WORLD IS STILL WHOLE!(tvaraj.wordpress.com)
• December 21, 2012: Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere or Is It Doomsday 2012? (tvaraj.wordpress.com)
• The End of the World tvaraj.wordpress.com)
• December 21, 2012: Hello World, Did the Mayan Prophecy Happen?(tvaraj.wordpress.com)
• Day Before Yesterday NASA Released Video: “Why the World Didn’t End Yesterday” (tvaraj.wordpress.com)
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English: Mayan zero Français : zéro maya Español: Cero Maya (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

How I survived the December 2012 apocolypse mayan predicted.

Where the heck is my video android?

What I love is when I rely on technology to work and it doesn’t and I miss a deadline for posting a new article and look like a schmuck!

It is a new day.  The end, the shift, the great cosmic nothing happened yesterday.  One big huge letdown just like every other disaster crisis that builds up just to lead to more of the same old crap.

In order to feed clothe, shelter, provide water, and educate the entire planet one must first be able to do so for himself/herself.  I have yet to do that.  Yet to live without a need for money.  So how can I expect to create a world that doesn’t need it?

It was my hope that a catastrophe would happen, and that would justify studying leadership, and community development.  It would cause us to re-evaluate how we were doing everything.  Now, nothing, just another day like any other day.

Sigh.  What a let down.  Not much of an adventure now.

Imagination was giving me a great picture of life.  Imagine living in woods that may actually have tigers in it.  I know Branson MO holds lots of wild animals that if a catastrophe struck would loose them into the wilds of Missouri.  Creating for a pretty unique habitat.  Imagine, being in the wilds of Missouri, say in Mark Twain National park and you run across Elephants.  Or down in Ark, near Cabot and Conway where Flora the elephant is housed.  Great circus, tragic story of how we are destroying ourselves.  Our creation habitat.

Instead I go back to a life where money exists and is needed for everything, but based upon nothing.  Knowing that the money we kill ourselves to gather is not worth anything but paper in a true survival situation.  Even today it is only worth something because our government says it is.  Not worth Gold of any amount, not backed by anything but the future labor of the US citizen.

Hrumph, not even the US citizen but the world citizen.  (one of the students thinks).

Students in a University designed to truly solve our greatest problems.  A worldwide forum for solving the security problem.  It is a fear of security that creates the chaos.  Fear of a lacking of some resource.  We do not possess a resource abundance problem, we have a resource utilization problem.

We do not lack adequate housing, we lack adequate means of providing access to housing.  We lack vision in as a collective taking possession of public property for the benefit of man.  In a world where men and women cannot simply lay claim to an underutilized piece of land and utilize it without first exchanging a worthless digital credit how can we ever get anything accomplished?

I’m not in support of stealing property from one to give to another.  What do we do with broken and abandoned buildings and neighborhoods, and small communities?  Strip malls that lay barren, and condemned?  Buildings that cost more to repair enough to be legally utilizable, than one could make in a lifetime, but government can create with the push of a button?  What do we do with those things?

Todays world is about teams, and communities.  It’s a bit of a challenge for the guy who wants to simply live.  Let me walk into the wild places, and put my hand in Gods hands.  Experience that for the sake of experiencing it.

Then what?  We learned lessons.  We failed forward.  We learned things about ourselves, and our limits.  We pushed ourselves physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

Gained confidence, tested limits, pushed boundaries.  Found new allies.  Saw new perspectives.  Gained new insights.  Future is going to be amazing!  That is the intention.  You are now free to do it all!

Related articles

• Post Mayan apocalypse blues: After mayan apocalypse failure, believers may suffer (sott.net)
• The Mayan’s were Right Indeed !! (modishashank.wordpress.com)

But since it DIDN’T end, what are the real implications?

• The news media’s relevance continues to decline for reporting one more inconsequential and irrelevant story.
• The malls and shopping centers are crammed with people who expected the world to end, but now have to get the Christmas shopping done in a hurry. (If you get a strange gift from Aunt Bertha, it’s probably because she was expecting the world to end. When she got to the mall, the choices for gifts were pretty small, so just be glad she remembered you at all.)
• Sales of Mayan calendars have plummeted. It doesn’t matter anyways – it’s now as useful as a paper calendar from 2005.
• People are scouring the Internet to find something else to worry about.
• I am pleased to report that our two cats were totally untroubled by the situation, and have maintained their daily quota of naps.

So the world continues on.

I’d write more, but the kids just came down and told me they’re out of clean clothes. It seems that “just in case” they didn’t see the need to take their dirty clothes to the laundry room.

The Mayan calendar ended yesterday on the winter solstice and so it all came to a close. The planet had its longest night, the symbolic moment of seasonal death and rebirth, and the obsession with the apocalypse coming the day the calendar ends has met its inevitable terminus, as our teleological western obsession wakes up to the fact that time is a construct and a circular Mayan vision cannot be forced into a western linear one. The contemporary obsession with apocalypse gives credence to Fredric Jameson’s oft quoted statement that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.” Stagnation breeds a longing for a way out and so culture provides us with endless iterations of visions of the ultimate release from care…and everything else.

So, I found myself walking with a friend in the river bottom as the sun set on the shortest day of the year, birds twittering and fluttering and rabbits carefully munching the grass in the safety of the bushes, and I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to perceive, in the brief moment prior to being incinerated, a giant meteor entering the atmosphere on its apocalyptic trajectory. What would be the revelation that would open in such a moment? More importantly, what is the revelation that awaits in every moment, in that particular moment of pondering the apocalypse, awaiting to shatter my world, the only world I know or can ever know? George Eliot has said that the best of us go about well wadded with stupidity and that if this were not so then we would be broken by the sheer reality of life. Protected by our ignorance and fantasy, we move through life as one long process of avoidance. Apocalypse narratives can be fantasies of escape or they can be calls to open to the revelation that every moment is apocalyptic in its potential; every moment is the moment in which one can realize the fantasies that determine one’s life.

As I watched the horizon deepen into pink and purple hues of evening, I thought about the daily movement facilitated by many small decisions every moment made that force the planet further into an ecological shift that will most likely radically alter and end human civilization as we know it. As we rounded a bend in the trail, we heard a metallic rumbling and out of the dark emerged the form of a man in a t-shirt and dirty jeans pulling a rusted old newspaper box on a hand-truck. As my friend helped him with his unwieldy burden and we kept him company on the darkening trail, he told us of how he has taken to removing scrap metal to earn extra money.

English: A heap of scrap metal (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

He recounted how he had pulled over two thousand pounds of metal out of the river bottom already and used much of the earnings to pay his girlfriend’s internet bill and so had little left for his own needs. Having helped my friend a year ago collect scrap metal for a few weeks to make ends meet, we could relate to the man’s plight. Scavenging in the new global economy has become a necessary activity even in those places where one would think it would not be so. Fantasies of affluence keep people from thinking of the daily reality of struggle for much of humanity. We live insulated in our dreams of comfort and slowly asphyxiated by convenience. I had to admire this random stranger; in working to support himself, this man was also helping to clean up the trash with which humans have littered the land. This newspaper box had been stolen, broken into for the change, and dumped over the cliff side at the edge of the road above the river bottom and so it rested until last night with all of the other detritus of casually careless humans, providing hiding places for the rabbits as the world ends over and over.

Feast of the Jaguar: grilled market fish

But before dinner, two very friendly young priests had set up a confessional box, where diners could confess their sins before enjoying their last supper and preparing for The End.  Naturally, Lisa and I went to confession and I regaled the priest with the most lurid sin I could recall committing.  I think he was impressed, or possibly depressed, because he wanted to take our photos, perhaps to pass onto the police. But he used the most ancient, massive and funky-looking circa 1980s Polaroid camera I have ever seen which needed five minutes to warm up properly (!) and clearly had a dodgy viewfinder, so the results were thankfully rather ‘off-centre’.

Preparing to take confession.

Secrets of the confessional!

The mobile confessional. All sinners welcome.

Happy after confessing my sins!

But I loved the idea of their mobile confessional. The reverends revealed that they regularly de-sin clients at gigs like the Last Supper Club and festivals.  So do look out for them if you feel the need to confess.  I thoroughly recommend them and confession is a lot cheaper than therapy. Check out some of their pictures at uberschnap.tumbir.com. 

I explained to the holy fathers that Kevin and I had also come up with the idea of a mobile confessional in our hero-hunting graphic novel series Marshal Law.  The priest would drive through the red light district of San Futuro, California, imploring sinners to “Stop Me and Confess”.  Like they used to do with ice-cream.  I thought it was an excellent religious idea.  A sinner could commit the most unspeakable sins, have them instantly forgiven, and then step outside and do it all over again.

Below are some images from Marshal Law featuring our mobile confessional to put all this in context. You’ll see our priest is also promoting Armageddon, spreading a message of fear to bring the punters back.  And I have to say it works.  I recall meeting a priest at a christening and asking him how work was going?  Like you do.  “Sadly,” he said, with a pious smile, “it takes a disaster like 9/11 to bring people to their senses (or their knees?) and fill the churches once again.”  I’m just no good at faking it, he must have seen the expression on my face, because when he left early to “visit the sick” he deliberately avoided my outstretched hand.

This has probably been a good week for him.

The collected Marshal Law de luxe edition from DC Comics is available in April 2013.  It comprises all our Law stories, apart from the cross-overs. More news on Marshal Law soon.

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(c) Gregory V Driscoll  2012