The Ones with Charmed Lives

There weren't always dragons in the Valley. The story that the old ones passed down was that once the dragons were hummingbirds, and before that, they were angels. As the hummingbirds lost their voices, their bright and colorful feathers vanished. Their bodies expanded and their wings became vast, dark, and leathery creaking appendages that snapped like sails as they beat against the sky. Those newborn dragons eventually became Mara– our demons. They shrieked and howled as they circled the kingdom like vultures, bruising the earth with their heavy shadows, weighing it down in their rage and sorrow.

Before the angels descended into hummingbirds, the kingdom thrived in an abundance of peace, freedom, and beauty. The king in those days was a wise and benevolent leader. He was loving and kind. He accepted every individual unconditionally, without hesitation or exclusion, just as they were. This meant that he valued all of his people equally and provided for them generously, regardless of their race, gender, beliefs, usefulness, or standing in society, for he knew that there were some who were vulnerable, and he wanted them each to have every opportunity to experience their fullest potential in life. He prized every man, woman, child, and creature, for he knew in his heart that the only thing that made him a good leader was that they were truly his equal in value.

He rewarded his people in lavish abundance for their labors, ensuring their every comfort and joy. He was a just and fair father to them, and he provided them with his guidance and protection. He treasured the gifts that his people offered him– their arts, their crafts, their creations and inventions, their innovations, ideas and solutions, their talents, their energy, their honesty, their accomplishments, their joys, and their laughter. In return, they were grateful for his care and benevolence, for they knew they were the luckiest people in the world. They knew they were the ones with charmed lives, and the kingdom was an eternal spring for the king and his people.

Because of their appreciation and affection for him, they built peaceful and prosperous cities in his kingdom. His people were loyal and in perfect harmonious cooperation with him, giving him the best of who they were through the quality of their work. They planted gardens, cared for and cultivated flourishing harvests, and shared in the cornucopia of beauty and joy. They cherished and protected the kingdom’s creatures. They built ships and sailed to far lands, returning with wonderous stories, jewels, and spices, selling them at the marketplace and paying a fair and reasonable tax to maintain the well-being of their kingdom. The balance of their profits were their own to keep and enjoy.

Their queen was just as tenderhearted as the king. She was in full possession of her rightful place at his side, and he regarded her as his parallel in value, worth, and power. He treated her with the respect she deserved, protecting and supporting her, and she reciprocated by filling his life with respite, nurturing, comfort, joy, and beauty. He honored and adored her, heaping rubies and silks at her feet. In her pure love for her king, she demonstrated her pleasure in these gifts with humble grace.

The love the people felt for their king was given to their queen in equal measure. She was a warm and affectionate mother to her people– her Beeings– for she was the Queen and Keeper of Bees, and the Mother of the Earth, and they responded to her with sweetness, care, and devotion. She nurtured them and worked her magic to feed them exquisite banquets of honeyed wine and exotic foods. She soothed them with gentle lullabies, delighted them with perfumed gardens, and offered them warm and welcoming homes full of color and sunlight. She inspired them to paint masterpieces, compose transcendent music, plays, and poetry, and offered them galleries, stages, and museums to share their creations. She gave them pets to amuse and comfort them and remind them of her great love for them. Her people swam in her streams and played in her meadows, thinking of her and her beauty as they gazed upon the stars shining brightly in the sky at night.

The love that the king and queen felt for their people was without judgment or punishment, for they knew that only giving them free will and the ability to choose between fear and love empowered them. They knew that the wicked were themselves wounded and in need of care, compassion, and rehabilitation. Indeed, they healed and restored even the most broken of souls– the ones that had lost their humanity and inflicted suffering upon themselves and others. They loved and forgave the willfully ignorant, the ugly, the distorted, the disloyal, the brutal, the violent, the hateful, the murderous, the suicidal.

They understood their pain, and they knew that only wounded people created wounded people, and that healthy people helped others be healthy too. They knew that their own abundance and beauty would soon wither and die without care and compassion for the wounded and needy, for the key to their thriving prosperity was tethered to the vibrant health and vigorous well-being of each individual in their kingdom. They were aware that their own value as leaders was tied to this very thing and that one could not thrive without the good health and well-being of the other. Thus, they brought the wounding wounded into the temples of healers and medicine, freely restoring them with elixirs of love and forgiveness.

The effort and energy the king and queen spent to love unconditionally was not only for themselves and for each other, but all Beeings and creatures— all in their experience. This created the balance and harmony necessary to maintain stability and strength for themselves, their kingdom, and its people. Never were a people so strong, robust, or happy. Never was a kingdom more prosperous or powerful, for the king, queen, and their people were honest and good and pure of intention. The mutual love and appreciation for one and all was constant and without condition.

The kingdom and its people needed neither church nor temple to appreciate the magic and wonder of the Divine around them. Their connection to Divinity was a direct experience they felt in every sunrise, every cool breeze, every newly born child, and every harvest. Their god—Life Itself— was everywhere and they were conscious of this and mindful of its presence within themselves. This knowledge filled their hearts with peace and joy, because they knew there was no separation between Life and themselves– everything in their experience was an expression of the same continuous stream flowing on an infinite spectrum of living energy. Indeed, all Beeings were localized expressions of the Whole Field of Life, whether they were charmed or not.

Hundreds of years went by, and the king and queen received their own beloved siblings as visitors to their kingdom with arms open. However, the visitors were not the dear loving siblings they presented themselves to be: they had become imposters, betraying and deceiving even themselves about their self-worth. This deception was created by their fearful delusions of suffering, death, and poverty, as well as the belief that they were separated from the love of Life. They had become greedy and grasping, even taking what belonged to others, and the intention they held was to take all that belonged to the king and queen and make it their own. They installed themselves in gaudy and extravagant castles in the hills, and from this position, they could look down upon the people in the Valley.

The presence of the imposters had a pernicious effect on the kingdom and its people. Slowly over time, they crushed the hopes, wishes, and dreams of the people by stirring their fears, preying upon their suffering, and poisoning their beliefs. This enslaved the hearts and minds of the people, and in many cases, even their physical bodies. The imposters harnessed and used these energies to empower and enrich themselves. Thus, the will of the people was broken as their sense of individuality and the ability to express themselves freely was obliterated. They lost the knowledge of their own beauty, their freedom, their self-worth, their power, their well-being, and the ability to experience joy. The true essence of the people became ever more obscured as the imposters controlled and exploited them. The destructive energies of the imposters cast shadows on the truth and power of who the people really were and all that they could really do and experience. Most of the people fell into depression and despair. Many developed diseases and wasted away. Many took their own lives.

The imposters commandeered the airwaves and broadcast their lies in shrill voices, shouting that the king and queen were “tricksters” and “connivers” who wanted the people to be weak and powerless. When the people heard these broadcasts, many of them fell for the imposters’ lies and believed in them. The king and queen were forced to go into hiding because the hearts and minds of their people had been poisoned against them. The true monarchs were hidden and protected by wise Beeings whose pure love and compassion kept their humanity intact. These Beeings concealed their beloved king and queen in a cave in a faraway land, keeping them warm and safe as they watched the kingdom fall around them.

It was at this time that the angels became the hummingbirds that the people needed so desperately. The queen walked through the forest near her place of hiding and whispered messages to the hummingbirds, who carried them back to the people and hummed them as beautiful songs, reminding the people that beauty was still present even though the world appeared to be bleak. However, very few of the people were able to hear the messages of Life within the music because they were losing their ability to Be Mused.

The imposters taught the people that the way to succeed in life was to treat it as a competition for survival. To be the fittest meant gouging your way to the top– to mutilate, cripple, and extinguish everyone else along the way. The imposters taught that to be a real victor meant to thrive in obscene opulence, posturing and crowing at the expense of the well-being of others.

The kingdom's people were so starved for love that they became frail and weak with disease. They saw themselves as victims and succumbed to the delusional lies told to them by the imposters. They believed in the illusions they saw in the face of fear– indeed, all in their perception was hate, poverty, violence, suffering, and death. They struggled to see and believe that anything of beauty or joy remained in the world around them, so some of them responded by embracing the “us or them” ideologies of fear completely, inflicting cruelty and misery on others.

The god of the imposters bestowed extremist unctions on the disciples that most demonstrated their fitness for survival by exploiting others. He rewarded them with roles and positions of political and religious power. This made the disciples feel entitled to behave with zealous sanctimony and an overinflated sense of self-worth. They strutted and crowed pridefully, preening like turgid cocks. They shook their fists and demanded fealty from dissenters, resistors, and objectors. But the god of the imposters was bloodthirsty, and his disciples were his best footsoldiers for delivering punishment to those people he hated– despite the fact that he claimed them as his own creations. Anyone that protested the laws of the imposters' god was deemed a heretic and unworthy of his largesse, deserving only humiliation and destruction. And the dissenters were many, so the god of the imposters armed his disciples and ordered them to rule nations with fear and weapons of mass killing and destruction, starting wars upon wars, upon wars…

The imposters and their disciples deprecated the kingdom’s diverse cultures, colors, and customs. They waged campaigns of suppression, repression, and subjugation, and the kingdom became drab, silent, and colorless. Their disciples struck the people with weaponized holy books, distorting and corrupting the Truth so it could be used as bludgeons and knives to carve channels of fear in the hearts and minds of the people in order to keep them in line. The disciples wrote unjust and absurd laws and destroyed the innocent and defenseless with impunity. They used rape, abuse, neglect, enslavement, control, and exploitation to try to extinguish the last remaining spark of power in the strongest of the people. They did this by applying these horrors to the most vulnerable and beautiful— the women, the children, the indigenous and people of color, the intellectuals, the shamans, the mystics, the artists, the healers, and the teachers—those Beeings who were still closest to the Truth of Life. The imposters placed them in shackles. They lashed the innocent and vulnerable to stakes and lit the flames, sacrificing them to their bloodthirsty god. They laughed in mockery as these things wounded and weakened even the strongest of the people and caused them to become angry and warlike as well.

The campaign of hate, violence, and death the imposters and their disciples waged against certain tribes and individuals was devised to weaken the kingdom completely, enabling them to reap its last few remaining treasures. The people who bought into the imposters’ campaign of hate sacrificed themselves to kill innocent and vulnerable souls and nations in ever expanding wars and destruction. Meanwhile, the greedy imposters swindled the people and their families out of their homes and properties, further engorging and fattening themselves on the casualties of their faithful soldiers, and then blamed the vulnerable and innocent for their own selfish deeds.

The imposters waved their weapons and guns in phallic tournaments born of secret insecurity and failure. They pointed their fingers and shrieked in shrill voices that everyone who was different was a threat and must be destroyed for their peculiarities, until finally, the people turned upon each other– brother against brother– in the flawed belief that they were all fighting for their survival. They maimed and murdered One and Other in the name of god and country, for the god of the imposters was an unjust and punishing god who sill demanded blood and sacrifice from everyone who was delicate or different, and therefore, undeserving of the life he himself “gave” them.

Still the god of the imposters demanded monuments and churches dedicated to his wealth and power, cajoling and convincing his starving followers to contribute what little they had in a campaign to further fatten his coffers since he was never satisfied with his abundant fortune. The imposters even continued to drill holes in the earth and extract her resources and energies until there was nothing left, and she and her creatures were dying, and yet there was no satisfaction for their greed.

When the survivors of all the wars and destruction opened their eyes and peered through the smoke and dust, they saw that the god of the imposters had toppled from his pedestal, and they realized that he was merely a god of fiction– a false idol. There was no such god as the one with the frozen, grimacing smile that sat in judgment upon them, dispensing punishment like an infant in a tantrum. The survivors saw through the deception of the imposters and their disciples and knew that they'd been divided and conquered by the fear, judgment, and control that had imprisoned their souls and crushed their spirits.

THAT was hell.

In the distance, the survivors observed a beautiful light glowing faintly through the smoke and ash. It revealed the beauty of the Heaven that was always present in the here and now on earth– the fragrant flowers that still managed to creep through the cracks in the concrete, the hummingbirds that buzzed among the trees– and the people knew then that their true god, Life, was resilient and they hadn’t been abandoned. They thought of their Mother the Queen, the Keeper of Bees, who inspired them to Be Mused and create a joyful world for all of her Beeings. They remembered that they were all One in truth, beauty, and goodness, and saw that they couldn't thrive without One and Other. They knew then that One in love with Life can't be the victim of an illusion but can only flourish in the truth that Heaven is always present everywhere, for all time.

They realized that freedom can't exist if a god doesn't love its creations enough to cherish them unconditionally and grant them free will. They understood that only such a god creates truth, goodness, and beauty in life. They sensed their true god's presence in themselves and in everyone and everything all around them, and recalled that such a god is truly the energy and consciousness of Love and Life Itself. They fell in love with themselves and with the Life within them and in every creature in the kingdom. They vowed to honor the Life-force by protecting it, cultivating it, and sharing it.

The people set down their weapons, knowing that love is distorted and can still wound if it restricts and excludes its enemies. They sat under a tree and trained their gaze on their demons– their suffering. They surrendered their fear, saying to their demons only, “I see you, Mara.” The demons produced temptations of gold, of flesh, of fame, but the people merely laughed at those illusions, and affirmed once more, “I see you, Mara.”

The demons were enraged and struck them with mighty weapons, but the people were indestructible, as they remembered the Beeings they really were. They touched the earth with their fingertips, sinking them deep into the soil, where their souls took root and were fortified by their Mother. In this way, the people claimed their place in Heaven, which was located right here and now in Life on earth. They finally understood that the weapons used by the demons were illusions produced by their own fears and wounds.

A placid lake appeared in front of the Beeings, and in their reflection on its mirrored surface, they saw their own Divine Face, and knew that they were their own god– their own angels and their own demons. They realized that through their choices, they empowered One or the Other, and knew that the best they could do was to love them as One and forgive the Other.

The weapons of the demons fell to the earth as harmless blossoms, taking root and revealing the truth, beauty, and goodness that had always existed within them. The fragrance and beauty of Mother Earth rose up in witness to the declaration of the people and their claim to Life. This essence was the deepest wish of the Queen of Bees, that each Beeing would stake their claim on earth as they did in Heaven.

The light grew stronger as the people knew that good and bad, pure and profane, light and dark, strong and weak, powerful and vulnerable, rich and poor were all sides of the same coin– they were all expressions of the full spectrum of Life. Both sides of the coin were necessary in order to provide the contrast that helped the Beeings perceive the meaning that enabled them to learn and evolve. They grew grateful for the opportunities that their demons and suffering had provided them to grow, heal, change, and evolve into something better than they had ever been before. From this understanding, they loved, accepted, and forgave their demons– themselves, as well as the imposters and the disciples who followed them and caused suffering– without restraint or condition. The people blessed all their demons and sent them on their way.

The truth of the goodness and beauty in Life became clear to the imposters and their disciples, and they realized that the god they’d worshiped was merely a god of their own clumsy creation and the heaven they’d constructed was not a place that anyone wanted to experience. In their new understanding, they began to heal. They approached the people, humbly requesting to be admitted to the kingdom. The people enfolded them in a warm embrace, welcoming them home. In this way, the imposters were returned to their own authentic selves once more. At last, they cooperated with the people, working with them and exchanging gifts with them, everyone enriching each other as they built shelters and planted trees and cared for the land and its creatures.

Thus, all of the dragons and all of the demons fell to the earth, withered and exhausted since no one believed in them anymore. They tucked their weary heads beneath their leathery wings, and slumbered beneath Mother's loving mantle of soil and grass, only to be born again as the protective angels and creative muses of every citizen and every creature within the kingdom. Balance and harmony-- truth, goodness, peace, freedom and beauty– all were restored to the kingdom's people in abundance. Life Itself was appreciated in all of its diversity once more– each of its colors, languages, music, textures, flavors, beliefs, and creations were valued and honored and celebrated.

The people held a festive banquet in honor of the return of the rightful king and queen to their thrones, and the kingdom burst into brilliant technicolor, perfect melody, and jubilant laughter. Hummingbirds reappeared and sipped nectar from perfumed flowers in flourishing gardens. Crops multiplied, animals cavorted, children played, and the kingdom and its people prospered once more, as a band of angels strummed their lutes and played their horns, singing, This Will Be An Everlasting Love in delicious harmony and celebration of Life.

As the people woke from their nightmares, they learned that the road to Heaven took them through hell. They discovered that they were ALL worthy of being the ones with charmed lives– even the wicked and deceiver– thriving once more in the perfect, present, and eternal now, because living a truly charmed life in harmony with the earth that Life gave them was always the real proof of Heaven.