Another cycle ends

Thursday, October 31, 2013

I want to think this is all about Halloween.

But it’s not.

This time of year is always that time of year when great changes happen, changes that seem bad at first, but over the test of time, show that they are positive.

Freud, of course, calls this an anniversary syndrome, and claims that people either cause events to happen at particular times to fit particular moments in their lives, or attribute events to these moments that do not otherwise apply.

I prefer the spiritual interpretation.

Tomorrow is All Souls Day, and so traditionally, today is the day when all hell breaks loose, and those wild spirits get to express themselves before they are forced back under wraps.

The last few years we have seen physical ramifications of this such as that freak snow storm in 2011 to last year’s Sandy.

But every year something dramatic happens inside or outside, and this year perhaps is a combination of both.

In some ways, the unstable forces of the world clash as part of some need to find a more stable existence, and so it is true now.

We come to the end of one cycle and the start of another, not an annual cycle that concludes something that might have started earlier in the year, but something that overlaps other cycles and takes time to resolve.

This year some of the dark forces of my world are coming to reckoning. Like all battles between good and evil, right and wrong, the conquest of the dark also removes something good from the world, the price the world pays for having bourn evil in the first place. So we watch innocence lured into darkness, who must become the sacrificial lambs for salvation.

It is only those who are not so innocent that survive, the ones who have already felt the stain of the darkness, yet have not completely succumbed.

The innocent and the guilty suffer the most – those foolish enough to believe totally in the spells cast over them, and those who do the casting.

The world is a purer place afterwards, yet at a significant cost, leaving a trail of innocent blood.

I feel sorry for those suckered into the depths even though they went there willingly, because they had become true believers or people willing to suspend their disbelief in order to obtain some sensual reward. Yet even when they are betrayed, even when it becomes clear that the spell-casters have merely used their innocence as shield for their own greed, they continue to believe. No shock can shake off the spell and so they are consumed.

In some ways, I even feel sorry for the spell-casters, who themselves are deceived, believing they will find some deserved reward as a result of their evil actions, when deep down they know they deceive themselves.

Levels of culpability vary, of course, some are more evil than others, some motivations are more vicious, or self-serving.

But in this cycle, I see only the most pathetic of players, insiders who all deceive themselves, living on the edge of something that cannot do anything other than crumble under their feet and cast them to doom.

They are blinded by their own ambitions, all of them seeking something they don’t honestly deserve – like those weaving, speeding cars on the Turnpike that rush ahead of everybody else, so talentless in their abilities that they can end no place else but in a car crash from which they will be lucky to survive.

Some of the players in this cycle will survive, and move on to new schemes, spinning new spells – leaving behind a landscape littered with victims or co-conspirators, who either fell for or hooked into a scheme that could not possibly work in the first place.