*Grand Mother

GRANDMOTHERS and GRANDFATHERS

As the 21st Century progresses we are witnessing on the world stage more horrors and chaos, turmoil and human suffering than ever before. For anyone who has stepped onto their ‘spiritual paths’ in the last twenty to thirty or even more years, it must raise the question ‘What’s going on?’

Since the beginning of time, the Grandmothers and Grandfathers of the human race have sat by their fires and wrung their hands, looking through pale eyes that have seen ‘life’ and set deep into the lined faces of those who have walked the earth for a life-time. They were neither the elite, nor masters of the universe but I bet they mostly thought the same thoughts, ‘What’s going on?’ Every generation of elders looks out to a world that has seemingly gone mad. ‘It’s not like the good old days!’ they say, woefully, yet the wisdom of their years has always told them that things will always be like this: the changing world will always seem chaotic. And as Time pulls the good things away into the past, we will be left with memories of ‘the way things were’.

I am an ordinary grandmother. I look at my own babies, now mothers in their thirties; beautiful women, hard-working and balanced in the fulcrum between their parents and their children, yet still feeling inside like the young and free spirits they once were. My mother, a great-grand-mother still puts on her ear-rings and wants to dance. My grand-babies, now pubescants-with-attitude, think they can rule the world but still take a teddy to bed.

But I am a Grand Mother in my visions, my aspirations and my imaginings. I am Grand in my wellies, in my garden planting cabbages, and I am Grand because I have a faith born in a crisis or two and growing daily. I am Grand because I have given birth, endured and survived the pain of labour and because I have so much love I have to hug people and give some away, daily. I am Grand because I have seen such heavenly things beyond this world and because I can bear to witness the suffering in others, knowing there is a higher purpose to it all.

‘What’s going on?’ Life is going on. The more the populaton of this planet increases, the more we will witness life in all its diversity and extremes. The more of those who consider themselves to be the elite, the saved, the chosen ones, the enlightened, the wise, the healed, the wealthy, the successful, the good and the righteous…

the more we could see the opposite.

The buzz on the airwaves is that it is the time of the Grandmothers. It is time for the women of the world to speak out, to bring their way of being to center stage and ask the Grand Masters to step aside for a while. Have the women been absent? Are we not still here, individually enduring and surviving, growing and evolving? Are the men folk all tyrants and bastards, domineering and disempowerment of women? And do we think that because someone has put out the buzzword ‘Grandmothers Speak’ that grandmothers ever stopped speaking? Is it time for Grandfathers to stop speaking now?

This hierarchical view may be new-age fanaticism. Men and women are all humans, and the forces at work in this world and all the other worlds are continually there, and have been since the beginning of time. If the male/female juxtaposition is changing it is surely just a swing of the pendulum. We may feel it, acknowledge it and talk about it but do we control it? Maybe we do and maybe by the power of our thoughts we can change things.

Let us listen to the Grandmothers but not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Let the Grandmothers and the Grandfathers teach us their wisdom.

Perfect balance is when the pendulum stops: yet the very swinging of the pendulum is balance in the making. On this funny old lump of rock, spiralling around the sun, spiralling around in the cosmos, we, the little you and me, are at once the least significant and the most important thing in the universe, purely because we exist, in some form, and seem to be aware of it. And we call her Mother Earth, this rock. Now she is a Grand Mother. And the Grand Father? So, ‘What’s going on?’

The vision of the Spirit Grandmothers speaking their message comes at a time when women are definitely changing. We are bold and beautiful, caring and fearsome; we have opinions, views and wisdom; we are pro-active and gentle, can cry with laughter and cry with sorrow. Every now and then the Spirit World sends us a vision of love and hope, support and guidance, and we thank the Grandmothers for coming at this time.

It will give us the strength to love our men even more, stand up to them and put them right when they are wrong, and listen to their stories, dreams and worries, while holding their hands. We will shout across the land when we have had enough of horror, suffering and destruction and we will paint our art in acts of kindness, forgiveness and understanding. Just the way women do.

Wendy Salter

[original writing]