Notes from underground: from the Awful Aughts to a blue moon and an embarassment of riches (New Year’s weekend 2009/2010)

Breakfast in bed

Psyngularity

NY Elevation

Wow! The psytrance scene tends to be feast or famine, but this is ridiculous! With New Year’s Eve falling on a blue moon and a Thursday night, there’s so many options for the weekend that it’s hard to know what to do.  Good problem to have!

2009/2010 is also wrapping up a decade that was in so many ways the Awful Aughts: the dot-com crash,  9/11, the Patriot Act , eight years of Bush/Cheyney, two wars, FISA, the Wall Street meltdown …. bleah.  Glad we’re done with it.  And 2009 was tough. Like I wrote a year ago, we may have turned a corner, but there’s still a long way to go.

Then again, 2009 was also a great year in a lot of ways: getting started on Qworky and Computers, Freedom and Privacy; lots of focus on diversity (in conferences, open source projects, and activism); social nework activism with #p2 and Get FISA Right, and then watching  the Sea of Green in Iran take things to another level; and much much more.  At least for me, it feels like we’re going into 2010 on an up swing.

And the Awful Oughts had their upsides as well, both intellectually (computer science is a social science :-)) and even more importantly personally.  In 2003 I wrote You shouldn’t exist/And you? a pair of personal ads-as-poems addressed to the universe.  The universe answered and the next few years kicked off a wonderful virtuous cycle filled with incredible women,  goddesses so amazing that by all rights they really shouldn’t exist.  As I had so optimistically hoped, we did in fact get along pretty well.  Is it any wonder I think I’m the luckiest person in the world?

When I think about how to make my world even better, I notice that In 2009, I didn’t spend anywhere near as much time hanging out with the goddesses I know — or my other close friends either.   That’s something to change going forward.  So #1 on my new year’s resolutions is to spend more time and energy with people I really care about.  Yeah, we’re all ridiculously busy and the logistics are challenging … still, my intuitions tell me that it’s worth the effort.

Five years ago, close to the midpoint of the decade, we saw Astral Projection on a blue moon.   The Tarot reading D did for me that night is really remarkable.  The two of wands reversed covering me conveys my boredom at the time and need for a new direction.  The two of swords at the heart of the matter spotlights my attempt “to maintain calm through your balanced rationality, which causes you to deny your intuitions.”  The Page of Cups and the Queen of Swords symbolize women who continue to transform my world.  And the final outcome is The Moon:

Aim to evoke a conscious desire to go further than intelligence – the understanding of that which is and decide to make a “leap” into pure and simply creativity. Intuition of faith – participation in the becoming of what is to be. Bring inner ecstasy back into your consciousness. Allow your intuitive powers to guide you – the change has come, even though it does not show.

Good advice — and many thanks to the goddesses Aphrodite, Eris, Artemis, Metis, Kali, as well as D and everybody else who’s reinforced it over the years since then.  It hasn’t always been easy for me to take but I’m working on it 🙂

So tonight, and the rest of the weekend, I’ll be choosing desire over fear, trusting my intuition, trying not to analyze things too much, falling through the limitations of intelligence into pure and simple creativity, and bringing inner ecstasy back into my consciousness.  And hopefully that’ll set the rhythm up for the entire year — and decade.

Happy new year, all, and here’s to a wondeful 2010 and a great decade.  “Terrific Teens” has a certain ring to it, don’t you think?

jon