I’ve been feeling into this for a few days now. Well, actually this one’s been around a long time in different forms. I quit asking for answers to it in meditation because I heard the same answer time and time again. Can’t say I liked it.

Many of you know I have written about this before. Why resurrect it now? Well, It seems like it’s time.

The question: Am I here now to assist in the shift from fear to love .. or to watch in love as Rome burns?

The answer: They are not mutually exclusive.

That is still the answer I receive. It hasn’t changed over the years, only now, it feels like more of the picture is filling in.

Humanity is spiraling steeply downward, focused on the evil, paying full attention to the rising tides of division, of polarization. Fear is prevalent and rather than dissipating, it is becoming more endemic. The collective seems to be quite lost in the dream of separation and that doesn’t bode well for a simpler, less painful shift from fear to love.

The question I’ve been toying with is what if fascism wins. Yeah. A big one. What if the US … and it seems the world … steps back in evolution, spirals downward in greater extremes, and fear and hate appears to win.

Is that what is coming? Can I be there with that?

When I first started looking at this possibility, and it is a strong possibility, not yet a done deal but close, my heart ached and my stomach twisted, nearly vomiting up its contents. But I knew that I had to explore it because I have peered into my own darkness, have wrestled with my shadow and my light, and standing on the fringe, hanging onto the light, does. not. solve. anything. It only perpetuates the shadow’s hold.

Ignoring denying condoning — shutting down media, attempting to stay busy, denying its possibility for destruction, doing nothing and tacitly accepting — or — resisting, railing against the fear that is swirling and amassing strength in the collective consciousness, weakens me. What weakens me, weakens the whole. It testifies to, creates as fact, that there is something to resist, that fear has power, that there is something to fear. It adds more fear to the already accumulating pile. It feels paradoxical and yet, is quite true.

So … rather than running from the fear, rather than making up stories about love winning, even though love will win in the long-run, it can’t not, I can sit with the possibility that right here, right now, Rome will burn.

I used to think that allowing such possibilities to be present created their actuality — that I was creating the disaster I toyed with. That is not so. Not facing it, not allowing it the freedom to form or to dissolve creates it. Holding it in anyway creates it. Resisting denying ignoring condoning is holding it.

So yes — sometimes in to 2020’s, fascism very likely will win. The earth will be populated by countries steeped in the art of control. Women and minorities will be harmed, as will, albeit more subtly, the white male enslavers. In that climate, nothing will be done about climate shift and the fallout in massive cases will not be livable.

This is the possibility.

So what do we do. Nothing? That’s impossible. We are expressions of words and actions. We do what we are given to do. We step up, stand up and speak out, if that is ours to do. We function from our model of the world, as we always have, and always will. We cannot do anything else.

What’s different now is that the lessons, the additional data points, the evolutionary curve, will be steeper — Everest steep. Expectations will shatter, leaving many standing beyond expectation, beyond belief, beyond hope.

We expected love and light, an easier expansion, a gentler relocation into love’s arms. We are going to get something a bit different and yet, be asked to stand in love and assist in the shift to love, as Rome burns.

This is what we are here for. What’s come before was the easy stuff. Don’t groan. No one said this would be easy. That was only misguided expectation. It is best to let all expectations drop. What are expectations anyway, but limits we put on life.

We can’t enter into the unlimited, we can’t facilitate the shift, we can’t even be the shift while dragging expectations with us. Time to put on our big girl and boy pants — the ones that allow us to feel it all, to stand right in the middle of it all — the shadow and the light, the fear and anger, the love and happiness and show up.

Even now, writing this, feeling into it, letting it have me, I feel dense energy rising, swelling up into my throat, a knotting in my stomach, a breath that can’t quite be breathed. So … I feel it. I let it too, be.