The Gold and Silver of Time

January 14, 2022

How do I want to spend my time today? 

As the question filters through my consciousness, the image of time as a commodity shows up, glittering coins of silver and gold. They are static, suspended against the infinite background of star-speckled space, motionless until given direction of where to spend themselves.

In this slice of the universe, within this physical body, mind, emotional construct, I am all-powerful. I dole out the coins as I see fit.

I am often foolish. I pay no attention to the finite quality of hoarded time. After all, admitting that my personal coins of time are inevitably going to run out is tantamount to acknowledging that I’m going to exit this planet…at some point.

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Funny how attempting to be spiritually aware has not made a dent in that deep-seated, atavistic terror of the end of my personal self.

I can tell myself it’s only the end of this body, it’s only the end of this lifetime. But that has no effect on the overriding, persistent fear of death.

We’ve been bred and then programmed to be easily manipulated, particularly through fear, and manipulated we have been over the millennia. Thankfully, it appears that such manipulation is all coming to an end. Soon. 

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I’ve noticed a drop-off in the fear quotient of late, so gradual it’s barely been perceptible. This feels like an accomplishment of stellar proportions. Despite everything being thrown at us, Homo sapiens is drawing upon a wellspring of resilience.

I appreciate this as a massive human accomplishment, as well as the Universe simply saying, It’s time.

It’s time to take these gold and silver moments that we are given, and spend them somewhere other than the bottomless maw of the fear machine.

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Over the last month or two, there seems to have developed an increasing level of impatience with the dragged-out status quo of Covid response measures. In California, when the governor extended the mask mandate through mid-February, you could almost see the collective eye-roll of some forty million resident souls. Again? When is this ever going to end?

There’s been an occasional brave, maskless face indoors. Only once or twice, given the baffling level of obedience I’ve noticed in Santa Barbara, but this wouldn’t have happened at all a year ago. Such a scofflaw would’ve been mobbed, if not literally, verbally.

Fear does peculiar things to people, even to the most polite and obedient kind of people. Or perhaps most of all, to the most polite and obedient kind.

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We have been paying a tithe of fear, using our bounty of time.

Perhaps many of us are sensing that it is time to pay respect to time. Stop wasting it. Stop giving away the power of our presence by dwelling in a fearful possible future.

We have been given a face and a focus for our collective fear, and it has held many of us captive for two years. The face, the façade, of Covid.

Heavily suppressed information about certain aspects of the pandemic is coming gradually to the fore. Or perhaps not so gradually. Perhaps the Big Reveal is just waiting in the wings, primed and aimed to puncture the balloon of hypocrisy disguised as “for your own good,” and strike it down with truth.

But we don’t need to wait on it. We don’t need to be told truths that we already know in our own hearts.

I see the shimmer of gold and silver. I hold the precious coins, marveling at their weight and taking comfort in their value. I don’t intend to waste one more nanosecond dropping those coins into the bottomless bog of fear, or its related tarpits of worry, anxiety, or depression. They’ve already taken more than their due.