Has this not been the week to cap all weeks?

And not just for Americans. I’m in several international groups and everyone everywhere has been holding their breath.

On Saturday at noon, as Celtic author Sharon Blackie welcomed 300 people around the world to the second class in her Your Witch Will Come course, she announced that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had just been elected. The zoom room erupted with joy.

And Sharon, who lives in Wales, joked that she could finally stop binge-watching CNN.

You see, this election doesn't belong just to Americans. Friends in Australia, Italy, France, Ireland, the UK, and New Zealand have communicated with me all week expressing how worried they were about this election. And now they’re all celebrating with us. Whew.

But this Notes from the Field isn’t about winning and losing. It isn’t about celebrating, although after I finish writing this, I just might have to crack that bottle of champagne in the fridge.

But I don’t want to skip over the deeper meaning of this moment by simply celebrating a swing in electoral politics that went the way I hoped it would go.

No, this election has a much deeper meaning than that.

This election has been an invitation to ask ourselves who we really are.

And not just in the US, but everywhere.

Whether we realized it or not, this question has dogged our heels all year. It became the question of 2020 when a tee-tiny invisible virus brought our patriarchal world to a grinding halt.

Maybe we should have seen this coming. After all, the question wasn’t trying to hide.

It arrived fully formed and clearly contained within the number of the year.

We’ve talked for a long time about the cosmic meaning of 2020—a four year that initiates a whole decade of four. Four is structure. A new structure.

Well, how can you build a new structure without looking at the old one, and making decisions about what stays and what goes, what fits and what no longer fits, what works and what doesn’t, what is loving and helpful and what is cruel and hurtful.

This is work we don’t want to do.

Why? Because humans do not like change. Most of us fight it tooth and nail. We have been led to equate security with things staying the same.

But if things stay the same, nothing can grow, nothing can evolve.

And if nothing in your life grows or evolves, you aren’t secure after all. Actually, you’re quite stuck. And stuck in a place you eventually realize you don’t want to be.

I know you’ve been there. I’ve been there, too.

I stayed “safe and secure” in a job I hated and a marriage that drained my life force so completely that when it finally ended in 1996, I described myself in my journal as swiss cheese so full of holes I could barely stand up.

With the shred of me that remained, I knew I had to do something I’d avoided doing for years.

I had to figure out how the smart, strong, confident 26-year-old woman I once was had dissolved into a sobbing 50-year old wreck who no longer believed in herself or her ability to create a life she might actually want to live.

That exploration unfolded over a three-year period in my journal. Page after tear-filled page, I showed up every day to ask how I got here.

We now know that as I wrote, I was discovering deep soul writing as I dropped into the theta brain wave state and magically penetrated the threshold between worlds.

Do you know the biggest and most important thing I discovered in that threshold place?

It wasn’t answers. Oh no.

The biggest and most important thing I discovered was that mighty questions, raw wild untamable questions, activate the living presence of an ecstatic and loving Divine Voice and generate some pretty raw and wild responses. Just the responses I needed to build a life I could inhabit with wonder and joy.

Of all the questions I asked, and I asked hundreds, there was one that led the way.

One that penetrated the dark corners. One that got the whole mystical adventure going. There was one question that surfaced then and resurfaces even now, twenty-four years later, as THE question that must be asked.

That question is: What have I been unwilling to see?

I love this question. Always have. Always will. And right now I find this question to be the perfect foundation for looking back not just at this tense week, or this fraught election cycle, or this year, or even this whole period of the history of patriarchy.

That’s not just an opinion. This kind of seeing is inherent in the year itself. When we say “20-20” don’t we often add the word “vision?”

20-20 vision means to see with both eyes, to have balanced clear and accurate sight.

Well…. When you look back at 2020 thus far, what do you see?

What do you see in your own life? The good things are easy to see. But what about the things you didn't expect to see? Or the things you have been unwilling to see? I bet this year of quarantine and pandemic has made a few things come to the surface that you might in the past have been too busy to pay attention to.

Now, apply this question to the United States as a living entity, because it is.

What has our slowly clearing vision over the last 11 months forced us to see that we have been unwilling to see?

On the painful side: you can’t pretend you don’t see income inequality, blatant racism, white fragility, white supremacists marching in the streets, police murdering Black people, immigrant children separated from their mothers, demise of public education, destruction of the environment, healthcare no one can afford, rising tolerance for abuse of gays, lesbians and transgendered people, and neighbors who refuse to do the simplest things to protect one another from a killing pandemic.

It’s a horror list, I know. And I know you don’t want to read it. Heck, it makes my stomach hurt to type it.

But it’s important to see the suffering and name it.

Because we are being asked to create a new structure in this 4 decade.

But how can we create a new structure built for equality and reverence and safety for everyone and everything, if we don’t first look hard at the world of suffering we have allowed to grow all around us.

This is exactly where I was 24 years ago.

I couldn’t create a beautiful life, a life I desperately wanted until I did the hard work of looking at the life I had allowed to grow around me as I clung to what turned out to be very false safety and security.

1. So step one is to see what we have been unwilling to see. Hold steady. Breathe. Look. Acknowledge. Name. And shed some tears.
2. Then, with eyes wide open, start a conversation with all that you have been unwilling to see. Ask how you can help heal the wounds. How you can contribute to change. How you can help create a world that makes beauty, and love, and reverence visible. For yourself. Your family. Your community. Your country. Your planet and the whole world.

I know that sounds awfully big. How can one person offset environmental disaster? How can one person change 400 years of racism? How can one person end a pandemic?

I don’t have a blueprint for that. I can’t see the big picture any better than you can.

But I know it’s there. The life that wants to be lived both collectively and individually is real. She’s alive and in communication with us, if we would just open our eyes to see and our ears to hear. That takes strength. That takes courage.

But it’s worth it. Because this beautiful life is possible. She’s alive. And waiting for you to see her. To hear her. To welcome her into your life.

It is the life that wants to be lived. The life that wants to be lived. Doesn't that phrase make your heart soar?

It's so much bigger and more beautiful than the life you think you want. The life you think keeps you safe and secure without having to change. That static life is actually a dead life.

The life that wants to be lived is hovering on the horizon. She offers possibility and beauty.

But the only way that life can come to life is in and through and as you.

That’s what The Lotus and The Lily intensive is about.

We look back at the year coming to a close and see what really happened through our 2020 vision glasses—the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Then, we turn to the future, not to predict it or declare what we want—because remember what we think we want might not be what we want at all.

Instead of making a laundry list of all the things we want—a materialistic exercise camouflaged as spirituality and, as the virus has shown us, a futile business anyway—we drop into The Mystic and ask the life that wants to be lived to lead the way.

We ask the life that is wiser and holier than anything we could create on our own, to show us how to live.

That’s where we put our attention: on how we commit to live not the things we want.

Do you see the dramatic difference?

• One is a patriarchal, linear, goal-setting process with you at the center directing all the traffic. It's exhausting and rarely works.
• The other is a mystical, magical, spiral process with the Feminine Divine Mystery leading the way and dancing you into your fullness and joy.

And when we do that together, the big magic happens, and somehow we take the first steps to create a world of reverence for everyone.

The magic begins in The Lotus and The Lily prayer intensive, opening Monday, November 16.

Click for dates, details, and registration.
The Lotus and The Lily: Complete 2020 and Enter 2021

to seeing with 2020 vision, asking big questions, and inviting the life that wants to be lived to come to expression in and through and as each one of us, 

Janet