Yesterday, on our morning walk, puppy Shadow and I were fortunate to be accompanied by Dan, an old friend and former Green Acres Village resident. Dan is 30 now, and coming into his own after his first Saturn return in a remarkably precocious manner, recognizing already that he is WHOLE, no longer deficient, a HOLE in his being rendering him desperate for (co-dependent) “relationship.”

It took me until my late 40s to reach this level of relatively continuous inner integration.

Luckily, Dan, and some of his friends, are unusually sane inside this mad mad world, and, I’d even say truly human, ensouled, following inner guidance, stepping into the beginnings of their authentic life paths They radiate a quiet integrity, something on rare display in any generation, given the disssipated culture that surrounds our tiny bubbles of individual and social sanity.

I can’t help but resonate with the “American anarchist and primitive ecophilosopher” John Zerzan (wikipedia), born in August 1943, so only eight months after me. Many of our peers are dead now, or otherwise deadened by the stresses of this seemingly — or should I say likely — climactic era in human history, when, for decades now . . .

things fall apart

the center cannot hold

. . .

the best lack all conviction

and the worst are full of passionate intensity.

I remember obsessively reciting the above lines from W.B. Yeats The Second Coming over and over in my mind. The occasion was Kent State, May 1970. But they might also have been running deep below when shocked into a terrible awareness by the Kennedy assasination, as a college senior, and pregnant with my first child.

That signature event, on November 22, 1963 turned the internal tide. I knew, with every fiber in me, that Yeats was right. And that we who are truly alive are thereby volunteering for an assignment that will likely take the rest of our lives, and with no guarantee of “winning.”

Frankly, now, 60 years on, two Saturn cycles after the Kennedy assasination, I remain astonished, both that we humans, in our ignorant pride, haven’t already destroyed the entire world, and that even some in my own, now “geezer” generation are still alive, conscious, and of service to the whole.

Like my young, precious and precocious friend, I want to be one for whom “the center holds,” no matter what, during these seemingly endless dark days that do or do not herald a Great Awakening.

Either way, let us live our lives as if they mattered. Because they do.

And when we live in that manner, with personal integrity, moment by moment, integrating projections whenever they occur, remaining “true to our selves,” our resulting “higher” frequency works subtly to not just dissolve personal conflicts, but to dissipate the monstrous dystopia we are enduring now.