The Almond Fruit are Falling

Painting by Nigerian Artist Joseph Eze

There is a big african almond fruit tree that looms over the back of the flat behind me that I am renting. It produces large almond shaped fruits, and have just ripened as February has set in. As if on cue to coincide with a new chapter and processing the last for the esoteric road I am on. A ripened fruit falls on the roof every 1-3 hours during a 24-hour period. In the middle of the night during a dead sleep, THUMP! thump, thump. Is it a cat jumping on the roof? Is someone trying to break in? No..it's another almond fruit. During the daytime it gets masked mostly by other noises around the flat. While recording my podcast monologue it fits right in with my first impressions of Nigerian culture. Loud and bold. Everything here makes its presence known with no apologies.

However not to be outdone in the waking me up category, are the deceased spirits that finally started showing up to my bedroom window about a month after I settled in. Mostly adults, and so many I had to reroute them to the kitchen so that I could get some sleep, and hopefully they get a bit of respite. I don't like turning away a deceased spirits in need, but I do need my sleep.

Sometimes while in the kitchen making a meal I forget that I rerouted the crowd there and I am immediately reminded because I start hearing someone behind me talking to me with my inner ears...at least the ones that can speak english. Nigeria has over 200 languages spoken because of an equal amount of tribes. So the language differential adds a bit of a barrier with the need to shift to imagery, emotion, and intent for communication for some. The kitchen seemed like the best place because so much activity goes on there, it is harder for visitors and the family I am embedded with to notice.

After over a year of a hiatus from podcasting, I am finally able to dive back in. The pandemic and acceleration of societal change had become an ongoing washing machine cycle that made anchoring near impossible for creative work. Then about two months acclimating to all things Nigeria, and WHAM! What felt like a creative tide came rushing in. Creative work tends to ebb and flow like waves for me. It took me a while to refocus on the way forward with all the changes that are happening and two words keep hitting my brain for the times: survival and evolution. Often, future lines of manifestation tend to unfurl through expressed art of many different mediums within societies...much of which is probably more localized to the landmass the artist is living upon. However there is much art that hints towards global change from the collective mind of the human species as well. There seems to be two lines that flow through western cultures and in particular my country....that is the hybrid of getting back to all things nature, and going off a cliff into a hyper dystopian global digital society. Both would require a complete overhaul with massive pros and cons, but I sense this overhaul that we see with the fall of our current civilization and the rise of the next one does not happen all at once, but over some time and usually by a series of events and overgrowth of artifice that is at imbalanced odds with nature. In musical terms this would look more like a 'cross fade', where the beginning of the next segment overlaps with the ending of the previous and both can be heard at the same time.

The more I seek to deepen my understanding of astrology, the more it seems when applied to the aproximate 2,150 age of civilizations existing within each sign. As we approach the end of overgrowth of the previous age of Pisces, this civilization we are in continues to decline causing a burst of new creative thought and expression that forges the way into the next age of Aquarius that teaches us how to relate to each other and everything around us in a completely global and increasingly interconnected way. Comparing aspects of Aquarius to the changes we have been experiencing already around the world are worth considering. Here is a great blog write up about society's through the ages for a very simplified overview over at Astrobutterfly. It's brief, but might be fascinating for some to research further.

~Amy Beauchamp