Karmic Heart

Dark clouds, uncomfortable in their cloying smog of regret hovered around everyone she saw. Day in, day out, the same doleful image as she walked the shores of existence with neither meaning, nor purpose.

The darkness was oppressive. More oppressive yet was the incessant clanging of tins, bottles, toothbrushes, and other careless debris of humanity that trailed behind every human in this new half-life in which they lingered.

Was it the toxicity of smog or the weight of the detritus of life that ultimately dragged the feeble survivors of the apocalypse to their death? Or rather the sheer weight of knowing, the toxicity of a regret born too late to redeem, that claimed their lives?

Either way, the survivors were thinning on the barren ground every day. Those most addicted to the technocratic-materialistic- mechanistic life Anne Wilson Schaef once warned us of, were the first to fall.

After the last harvest, came the silence.

Who would have thought a world without insects would be so deafening in it's silence?

Kara well remembers the warnings of her childhood, the climate "prophets" of her time. When her classmates were using social media to glory in the objectification of women, and to belittle each other in the smallness of their shared minds, Kara was watching documentaries about our once beautiful planet and the warnings of how we could act to preserve it. Greta had been a hero to her for her courage to stand true and courageous despite the scoffers.

Kara remembers reading the work of an imminent climate scientist, a researcher who returned from his work in the Arctic Circle broken by the knowledge of what we as a species, perhaps even just a generation or two of that species, had done. The irreparable damage we had done.

He spoke of 60 harvests remaining. Many scoffed. Kara wept.

The 60 harvests came and went with the gluttony of foolish, denial driven, incredulous men continuing to ask for more.

There was no more.

No more food.

No more clean water.

No more pure air, or forests, or seas teeming with diversity of life.

There wasn't an explosion.

There wasn't a war.

It was a silent transfer of power. A karmic realignment if you like.

The wobble on earth's axis set up a tremor that resonated with all the displaced mineral content of earth. The magnetic fields had been so disrupted, they shifted and took back their leading hand.

For most of humanity, it singled the end. For the Indigenous people of the world it signaled hope for redemption. Those gifted with "caretaking" their heritage, gifted with wisdom and knowings, so despised by those only interested in the "knowns", sought shelter in their sacred sites. They had always known the special energy those sites held, and returned to them again and again, even once the magnetic fields had been disrupted.

The empaths of the world breathed again, at once freed of the pain of our dying earth, to feel into hope again.

The orcas found shelter in the most ionised parts of the ocean and sent out resonances of peace. Without their energy, it likely all would have ended that dreadful day.

The indigenous people kept sharing dreamtime dance and stories in languages once forbidden by colonial empires. Layers upon layers of knowings echoing in their shared wisdom like the rings on a tree and the scales on a snake, and the under feathers of an eagle so needed for the great bird to take flight.

Without them, it all would have been destroyed completely, irreparably. They were, combined, a heart beat struggling to keep alive a body worn out before its time.

There were pockets of life, oases of sequestered hope. Kara felt the resonance. She knew it was inviting her, drawing her to a place of beauty and belonging. She wasn't free to follow though.

True, she wasn't hampered by the same smog and rubbish trailing behind her that others had as they walked. She had none of the discarded rubbish that most other humans had accumulated in their toxic walk on earth.

No, Kara had walked carefully, with a light foot on the planet she called home. She had never thrown anything away in her life. Anything, that is, except the one item that trailed behind her now, suspended in a magnetic trail of choices, dogging her every step.

It stops when she stops, it goes when she she goes.

One thing.

A gold locket.

The one thing in her life she had ever thrown away.

A locket seen in every photo of every matriarch in her family tree. It had been a gift from her great great great grandfather to his wife, her great great great great grandmother when he returned from "The Great War".

She had later given it to her daughter, who passed it on to her daughter, and so on down the line, until her mother had worn it for as long as Kara could remember.

Her mother. Her beautiful mother.

Kara remembers the shining metal, warmed by her mother's pulse, resting always above her mother's heart. Kara would touch it, almost like stroking a pet as she lulled to sleep in her mother's loving arms.

The day her mother's heart stopped beating, Kara's world ended in a way no apocalypse could ever bring.

A car accident. Life gone for the two people who had given her life. A moment in time tore open a cavern in Kara's young heart that had never properly healed.

The day of her parent's funeral her uncle gave her the locket her mother had always worn. Perhaps he thought it would be a comfort for her to wear it to her parent's funeral. Comfort wasn't something a twelve year old orphan wanted, her parents holding her whispering it was all a bad dream, that was the only comfort Kara was interested in.

They were in the car driving to the cemetery and in rash and vehement anger, Kara put down the window and flung the gold locket into the wind. The regret was immediate when she realised she had added more pain to her uncle, but she didn't want a cold piece of lifeless metal, she wanted her mother.

She later learnt how many hours her uncle had searched for that locket, and she too, tearfully joined in the search, but it wasn't ever found. An older Kara regretted her impulse, but the locket was gone.

Gone. Until the day of change. The day of reaping what her species had sown. When everything that had been carelessly discarded found its way back to the thrower.

The gold locket appeared that day. At first Kara thought it was a sign, that her parents were trying to tell her somehow that everything would be ok, that what was lost could be found again. That there could be a second chance to get it right.

Maybe they were, but though the locket was always close, she could never touch it, never hold it to her heart as it had nestled in her mother's heart all those years ago. The magnetic field kept it close but at the same time, always distant. A gap she could never seem to close.

She had had days now of pondering this half-gift, what it meant, and could she restore what she had once so carelessly discarded? She realised there was weight in it, weight in her choices, and now weight in the repercussions of her choices.

Though years had passed now since her impulsive choice, Kara knew she could never have worn that locket. Accepting the gift of the locket meant accepting her mother didn't need it anymore. Accepting her mother didn't need it anymore meant accepting her mother's death.

Death had seemed so final, so desolate. Looking back, Kara realised now that compared to this half-life of humanity, there had actually been something "clean" about her parent's deaths. Horrible, devastating, but at the same time, natural, the natural cycle of life.

As Kara pondered this, she realised the natural cycle of life needed death as much as birth for balance. Death gave a nurturing bed for seed to be sown. Seed sown gave hope of a harvest, something this dystopian nightmare had no hope of knowing.

Kara felt a shift deep within, it haltered her step, the resonance of hope vibrated around her and within her. She closed her eyes and accepted, accepted the goodbye she had never chosen, accepted the gift she had never wanted, she felt the warmth of her mother's breath whisper through her soul. It was alright, it was all going to be alright.

She felt something pulsing in her hand as she opened her eyes. The locket was no longer trailing behind her. In accepting death, she embraced comfort, the gold locket was in her hand.

The locket her mother, and all her matriarchal line before her had worn, was hers now. She accepted it. accepted her place in her natural family, accepted on a deeper level, her place in our global family.

The resonance got deeper. For the first time since she was twelve years old Kara felt hope. This time when the drawing towards hope came, Kara responded, no longer was she hindered by anything holding her back. She had embraced that which she once discarded and she walked forward.

She didn't know where she was going, she was just stepping into the drawing power of hope. As the resonance deepened, so too did Kara's purpose to help heal this half-life of humanity. She didn't know how, just that she needed to offer something.

On the horizon she saw rising like a mirage a posse of women, powerful, graceful, strong women of wisdom and intellect, and love. Empaths, women who knew how to heal the unhealable wounds of humanity. Kara stepped closer to their midst and as she did so, she knelt down and for the first time in her life, opened the gold locket her mother and mother's mothers had worn. There was something inside more precious than the photo or lock of hair she may have expected and cherished.

Inside the locket was a small round seed. A seed that no matter how old it was, still carried the potential for life within it. Every generation of Kara's family had taken the seed, planted it, reaped far more seeds, planted those, and each time, placed one seed back in the locket for another harvest.

Kara approached the healers with the only gift she had, a willing heart giving seed to share in the hope of another harvest.