Watching snowfall for the sixth day of a winter storm in the last few days of 2022, I realized I hadn’t shoveled this much snow in 20 years. Then, a blizzard had dropped 6 feet of snow in 36 hours at my rural Boulder County home.

I was resentful on day two, the heavy slush of a warm storm stretching my capacity to shovel a large driveway single-handedly. And especially frustrated by the snowplow driver whose hurried approach had deposited icebergs at the end of my drive.

Over the 8 days of plowing through snow, I realized Mother Earth was receiving what she most needed- moisture for her parched skin.

When I listened intently, I could hear her breathing a sigh of relief.

So I just shoveled, and began to feel enlivened by the dense moisture that would nourish Her spring and summer in the new year.

In Stark Contrast

And yet the year ended for me with a frightening and deep journey into the future of what we will face as humanity on planet earth.

Not to create disillusionment, nor to suggest this is ‘new’ news….

But the vision I got was that the Earth will burn. Is burning.

Because She wants to.

She’s done with our current approaches, no longer tolerant of who and what we’ve become.

She wants to be done with the scourge.

The horrific images I saw of the world catastrophically-burning and the forlorn eyes of millions was not to frighten me into inaction, but instead to propel me to start over.

Living on Sacred Ground

Rather than celebrating in typical form on New Year’s Eve, I stepped into a ritual intended to help me see what was needed from me to make a greater contribution to our future. To start the new year with fresh eyes.

The images I saw in my journey, the vision of the earth burning everything in Her wake, were horrifying.

I have no idea if those images were metaphorical for the “burning down” of the systems and structures of our material world, or if they were literal, like the wildfires I experienced in northern California (and happened globally for several years) in which all living parts of nature were scorched.

Or whether the (metaphorical or literal) burning will be soon, or far into the future.

I seldom have an awareness of the temporal nature of my visions. But after a lifetime of having them, I know that most of my visions eventually come true.

And my recent read of Bache’s LSD and the Mind of the Universe confirmed this vision for me. My childhood obsession with protecting our Blue Planet was anything but casual.

Spending hours in the darkness of that vision, my heart opening to the tragedy of the Earth as we know it burning, I held the collective tender grief of losing that which we hold most dear.

Is there anything more precious or sacred than the ground upon which we stand? I asked.

As I grew increasingly disillusioned in the fatalistic vision of the earth burning, I asked for solutions.

I begged for something to give me hope.

They responded.

We Must Be the Light

“Let go of believing you can do anything to fix it. You can’t.”

Wow. That’s a heavy message.

Heavy tears fell from my eyes, as I’d spent a lifetime wanting to save us all and my Beloved Mother from our self-imposed destruction.

I thought back to my childhood, taking family vacations in our station wagon. Watching my dad throw trash out the window and begging him to stop.

I never understood why we would mistreat the planet. Her beauty has always astounded me.

I came back to my unfolding vision and the instructions.

“The light gets in the crack. You can only see the light in the dark.”

I waited patiently, as these words were not new to me.

“Be the light. Help others find their light that burns within.”

Well yes, I understood that, basically what I’ve been doing most of my life. I can do that.

I listened more intently.

At that moment, the fireplace crackled and asked to be tended. I moved around the embers and placed another log on the fire. It lit quickly and the fire burned more brightly than ever.

They spoke again.

“Be the Ember. Keep the fire going. Don’t let the light go out. It is too hard to start the fire from nothing. Be the One that others can see burning bright.”

I recalled the recent Netflix documentary Ancient Apocalypse where journalist Graham Hancock travels the world looking for lost civilizations. Graham speaks about new data from historians and anthropologists that had uncovered the role of messengers who would survive the wreckage of civilizations and travel the world, reminding other tribes of the advances that had been made.

So all would not be lost.

And yet that kind of responsibility weighed heavily, overwhelmed me with the magnitude of the task.

How could I carry out the task from my small vantage point?

They showed me the headdress that I already wore. The glimmering gold luminescence that persists through all time when we radiate our sacred Beingness into the world.

Ah, this is what we are seeking, the Light! Now I understood.

The People of the Light

But alone? How could I alone accomplish this?

I realized later what a silly thought that was, but felt so fervent in being able to do something. Anything.

They took me to new sacred spaces we would create, as the old ones are destroyed.

There were caves and caverns that became great temples. Underground spaces filled with light. Places of ceremony and sacrament.

And still, where are my people?

They weren’t yet responding to my requests that would assuage my sorrowed soul.

Of being alone on a wrecked planet.

Of losing my precious Earth, my sacred friends, the trees and birds and all that has been Home.

I wept deeply, even in my infinite journeyed state.

How can she be gone? I cried.

They responded, “We must let Her burn, to rid Herself of the source. She is burning on purpose, to eliminate that which doesn’t serve.”

Ah, like we are doing, releasing the Shadow of humanity, but doing too slowly for ourselves, I replied.

“Yes, like that,” they allowed. “You must begin again, as She will.”

A New Beginning

Is this why the trees now talk to me? I queried.

I’d begun hearing Trees speak to me, each with their unique personality and message, and begun to record the conversations. Previously I had no idea why I was hearing the trees talk.

“Yes,” they said, “so that you will make a record of the Earth as She exists now. Tell the stories of the trees and birds and grasses. The beauty that exists now so people can remember and hold onto the possibility that She will return.”

As I heard these instructions, I couldn’t wrap my head around what kind of record would survive the Earth burning, but I knew that wasn’t mine to figure out.

My tears flowed freely, in gratitude that I had been recently given the gift of hearing the trees, so I could capture their stories for the future Beings we would become.

And then, quietly.

“You are the Dawn.”

The message broke me from the reverie of my recent dialogue with the trees.

I waited intently, curious what they meant.

And then I noticed the light in the distance. It was a faint blue light.

Was this a Being from another dimension?

I often see eyes as other dimensional Beings approach, which seems to be their way of calling my attention to their presence.

Or my mind wandered, was it more fires? As the world burned even more eerily?

I waited to see what would emerge, as the images in a vision often take some time to coalesce into something that my mind can grasp.

Then I began to see more lights. More blue images.

And in what seemed an eternity, but was probably a few seconds of linear time, out of the darkness emerged thousands of Beings.

Light Beings.

They were wearing dark shrouds of undetectable texture but with light emerging through their skin (skin being a euphemism for something that contained their presence.)

These Beings were blue, or at least the light they emitted through their “skin” (and what seemed to be eyes) was blue.

It also appeared that they carried lights, as candles or embers, though it was all quite confusing. I was aware I had no conception of how much light could be emitted through skin.

I’d recalled earlier wondering how I would carry an ember, or whether I was to be an ember, and realized my naive foolishness at thinking I would have to carry the light.

Versus to “be” the Light.

As these beings marched (floated?) toward me, I noticed the lights of the Earth shifting.

The orange glow of the fires burning had subsided.

And now there was a quiet emerging faint glow. Like a sunrise over the distant horizon at the ocean. A slow emerging light.

A new Dawn.

Out of the darkness as we become the light, the new dawn emerges.

Becoming the Light Within

As many of us are called into action in this deepening crisis on the planet, we will discover that our old approaches will no longer work.

We must become the full-scale unsanitized versions of ourselves.

And recognize that we each, in our own multi-faceted and unique way, are as much of the solution as any strategy, policy, initiative or global resolution.

Embodying the inner mastery of our soul and its unique gifts, talents and contributions- becoming the light within that brought us here, is the greatest remedy available.

Yet to become the undaunted and absolute/ indisputable/ undeniable rendering of ourselves, we must:

• – Release that which no longer serves- our former identities that harbor comfort, good enough and status quo.
• – Abandon the beliefs that we can figure it out or know how to move forward from here.
• – Let go of the need to feel or be safe, because that is and always has been a desire to control the outcome.
• – Abdicate the need to manipulate our environment to be that which satisfies us at the expense of others or the planet.
• – Quit consuming and producing at breakneck speeds for the false gods of productivity, growth and profit.
• 
  

The True Gift of Being Human

We have truly lost sight of the benefits of being human, as we allow the unfettered course of human “progress” to continue to destroy ourselves and the planet.

And I absolutely believe that we can find our way out of this mess, with great hope and joy and belief in the magic and limitless synchronicity of the laws of nature, if we reign in our compunction to endlessly produce and consume, those traits only conceived by humans.

The greatest gift in being human is living in a miraculous material form on this deliriously bountiful planet with absolutely everything we could ever need accessible to us.

If we could only see it, unfettered by our own luminosity.

What more could we ask for, in the new Dawn?