Lessons of the Ox
We have well entered the final moon cycle in the Year of the Ox and I sense the breath of the sleeping Tiger that awaits. The discipline of the Ox guides me daily through an exercise routine designed to strengthen my stomach muscles and back so that I may some day soon return to my hammer and saw, but I find another hidden meaning in the daily practice: opening my inner channels of energy, connecting the physical and spiritual in the warm currents of Chi flowing freely in the concentrated efforts of flexing and reaching. Thoughts turn to reflection and I begin to see the hidden rhythms with different meaning as the cycles close and open.
At the end of the last cycle of 12, in the Year of the Dog, we loyally followed the Universe, sniffed out its hidden path, and landed in a wild and abandoned forest. The Year of the Boar was quickly upon us and we accepted the pig’s dream to fly, casting ourselves completely into a leap of faith, building a home among the trees and spirits. The new cycle of 12 began again with the cunning Rat as we meticulously made lists of priorities, set goals and plans in motion for a sustainable future, studied our environment and gave name to the land. In this current Year of the Ox we have reaped both physical and spiritually kharmatic harvests, honey and fresh eggs, vegetables and herbs, solar electricity and self-pumped stream water, but also disillusionment and sickness, frustration and the collapse of physical strength.
I found myself pushing towards exhaustion, attempting to follow the Ox’s stride to finish my projects, but as my material gains mounted I let crumble my spiritual discipline, stopped actively meditating, no longer remembered my dreams, incessantly stirred awake in the night obsessing over the next placement of nails or joists or beams. I wrote less often, drew fewer images, and in the forgetting of my art I fell off my path, slipped on a stair from which I had never before slipped, and crashed in the dark. “The kharmatically physical and the spiritually material,” snorted the Ox, “are all the same to me.” I could not physically continue with the material work before me, though I tried with the well-known stubbornness of the laboring sort, and only worsened my physical state. The Ox then whispered through the electrical pain of another discipline which drives her forth. “I am known,” she mused, “for my physical strength, but it is my spiritual discipline that allows me to continue without tiring.” Head shaven, unable to move, I was humbled into succumbing to the true message of the Universe, turning physical, daily exercise into meditational reawakening. “The Tiger arrives next,” warned the Ox, “and he has no patience for the weak.”
The Tiger, the Tiger, the coming Metal Tiger. Associated with war and the greed of the power-hungry, the Tiger flashes gambles of high risk and great gains. The yawn of the Tiger awakening in the physical realm of our fragmented world already in endless conflict sends a shudder through me, but I steady my resolve with the Ox still at the helm. We need not battle against the Tiger, we must in fact become it, for a Tiger in the house protects against robbers and fire so that his energy may be our greatest threat and our greatest defense. This is the razor’s edge marked in the clear lines of a tiger’s coat, the ever-present spiritual divide of Ying and Yang, the chaotic twist necessary to spurn fractal, infinite, creative possibilities. And like all ruling animals of the zodiac, the Tiger will strike in both the physical and spiritual realms.
Powerful world leaders deeply embedded in the machine-driven, military consciousness are deceived to use the force of the Tiger for destruction for a Tiger can never be controlled and will lead to their own undoing. In the space of corrupt folly the Tiger can summon forth a new consciousness, give it strength and form. If we artists and lovers and believers in peace become the Tiger within our deepest spiritual selves and allow that energy to work through us into the physical world this year, what can we finally lose or shed and what will we gain? “You are learning,” laughs the Ox, “but keep practicing.”
At the end of the last cycle of 12, in the Year of the Dog, we loyally followed the Universe, sniffed out its hidden path, and landed in a wild and abandoned forest. The Year of the Boar was quickly upon us and we accepted the pig’s dream to fly, casting ourselves completely into a leap of faith, building a home among the trees and spirits. The new cycle of 12 began again with the cunning Rat as we meticulously made lists of priorities, set goals and plans in motion for a sustainable future, studied our environment and gave name to the land. In this current Year of the Ox we have reaped both physical and spiritually kharmatic harvests, honey and fresh eggs, vegetables and herbs, solar electricity and self-pumped stream water, but also disillusionment and sickness, frustration and the collapse of physical strength.
I found myself pushing towards exhaustion, attempting to follow the Ox’s stride to finish my projects, but as my material gains mounted I let crumble my spiritual discipline, stopped actively meditating, no longer remembered my dreams, incessantly stirred awake in the night obsessing over the next placement of nails or joists or beams. I wrote less often, drew fewer images, and in the forgetting of my art I fell off my path, slipped on a stair from which I had never before slipped, and crashed in the dark. “The kharmatically physical and the spiritually material,” snorted the Ox, “are all the same to me.” I could not physically continue with the material work before me, though I tried with the well-known stubbornness of the laboring sort, and only worsened my physical state. The Ox then whispered through the electrical pain of another discipline which drives her forth. “I am known,” she mused, “for my physical strength, but it is my spiritual discipline that allows me to continue without tiring.” Head shaven, unable to move, I was humbled into succumbing to the true message of the Universe, turning physical, daily exercise into meditational reawakening. “The Tiger arrives next,” warned the Ox, “and he has no patience for the weak.”
The Tiger, the Tiger, the coming Metal Tiger. Associated with war and the greed of the power-hungry, the Tiger flashes gambles of high risk and great gains. The yawn of the Tiger awakening in the physical realm of our fragmented world already in endless conflict sends a shudder through me, but I steady my resolve with the Ox still at the helm. We need not battle against the Tiger, we must in fact become it, for a Tiger in the house protects against robbers and fire so that his energy may be our greatest threat and our greatest defense. This is the razor’s edge marked in the clear lines of a tiger’s coat, the ever-present spiritual divide of Ying and Yang, the chaotic twist necessary to spurn fractal, infinite, creative possibilities. And like all ruling animals of the zodiac, the Tiger will strike in both the physical and spiritual realms.
Powerful world leaders deeply embedded in the machine-driven, military consciousness are deceived to use the force of the Tiger for destruction for a Tiger can never be controlled and will lead to their own undoing. In the space of corrupt folly the Tiger can summon forth a new consciousness, give it strength and form. If we artists and lovers and believers in peace become the Tiger within our deepest spiritual selves and allow that energy to work through us into the physical world this year, what can we finally lose or shed and what will we gain? “You are learning,” laughs the Ox, “but keep practicing.”
posted by Carol Bushar at 9:30 PM
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