So, here's the new gift. Whenever you start to get angry about something you have seen on the news or read or heard or been texted, pause for a moment and bring compassion to the person or the situation in your mind and in your heart. If it's your own life, your own situation, pause further and ask how this new situation may be offering you an opportunity to grow, expand, or express your intelligence in a new way. Bring love and compassion to yourself. There is no good. There is no evil. There is only our experience and the attitude we bring to it.

~ Thank you, Gregg.

     On or about the Winter Solstice of 2012, our solar system will be fully in the stream of a new photon beam of Light emanating from the center of the Milky Way galaxy. I believe that this photon beam is sending Light information to our sun and our sun is sending it on to us through the electrons streaming from its solar flares. Since 1987, the Harmonic Convergence, Earth first entered the beam. Each year since we have spent a few more days or weeks inside of the beam, and each year since the hold of the old paradigm of fear has loosed a bit more . . . and the rebirth of the light in our conscious awareness has grown. I believe that 2012 is an open door, an invitation to spiritual evolution, an opportunity to shift into a dynamic life pattern in which we will be capable of fully celebrating ourselves, as well as being fully aware of the whole continuum of life, taking actions and making choices which support the greater good.

My goal today is to keep breathing and being present to this opportunity to go within and breathe into the ground of my being in the dark of the long night, the darkness of the creative void.

     While dipping in and out of a couple of books by Barbara Hand Clow, Johan Calleman, and Hunbatz Men I have come across a deep teaching of the tree and all that it means. The World Tree has its branches in the galaxy, its trunk on the Earth, and its roots connecting to the core of the Earth.

     So, while I am walking through the streets of northern Chicago to my train each morning, I breathe in and see the trees, my brothers and my sisters. I look at their bark, the arc of their branches, and the sky. I breathe out, and I smile to the trees. They are my elders.

     And so I look within and I breathe and I allow the Earth's energy to fill me with peace and happiness and strength, the strength of being still while seeds mature and get ready to pop.