I was sitting at work doing my thing focused on the job at hand when the Jefferson Airplane tune “Go Ask Alice” popped into my head.  I’ve probably heard it recently and forgotten but it seemed very out of place.  It was just there.   It was a bit startling but now I’m humming it and definitely can’t get it out of my head.

I looked up the words on the internet.

One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you
Don’t do anything at all

Go ask Alice
When she’s ten feet tall

And if you go chasing rabbits
And you know you’re going to fall
Tell them a hookah smoking caterpillar
Has given you the call

Call Alice
When she was just small

When the men on the chessboard
Get up and tell you where to go
And you’ve just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving low

Go ask Alice
I think she’ll know

When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen’s “off with her head!”

Remember what the dormouse said:
“Feed your head, feed your head, feed your head”

I read through the comments which seemed to be written by young males who were probably not conceived until 20 years after the song was on “underground” radio.  It was funny to me to read the anti-drug debate that erupted in this comments section.  They liked the song, “It rocks”, but felt compelled to say “don’t do drugs” or else felt compelled to dis each other for lack of experience in that area.  My favorite, “Lol, I said no to drugs, but they didn’t listen.”

But I digress.  In the spirit of anything can find connection to anything else, I will make some non-drug related connections of my own.

To me the most relevant connection is in the lines

When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen’s “off with her head!”

When I began thinking about writing a blog entry after several months lapse, the quote that I was working with was Dickens’ best of times/worst of times, the opening paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

The first line is very familiar and its almost cliché that any time can be considered both best and worst and certainly many have made the claim about our current time.  It all depends on one’s circumstance, or does it?  Does it depend more on how one reacts to circumstances, the state of being, the focus one chooses.  It is my belief that the latter is the case.

In the worst of times it is not easy to maintain a mental attitude of hopefulness, peace, loving-kindness toward others; in the best of times we often forget the discipline that makes it possible to develop these positive attitudes.     In reality we can only start where we are.

It seems that dark clouds continue to gather.  No one seems optimistic about the economy, the euphoria that followed Obama’s election has left us, the political bickering that  has made most lose faith in our government is getting worse, and on the individual level more people are living in dire straits than since my mother’s time during the depression.  I have been reading news articles about how people are losing hope.

I am more and more convinced that what we are seeing is the transition time before a radically new way of being comes about.   Of course I am highly influenced by a lot of “New age” sources.  Since 2012 is so widely known now it is easier to speak of this transition time.

I have also been studying astrology for some time and from an astrological perspective the future also looks a little bleak.  This has been written about by many others so I will not go into the technical complexities here.  Suffice it to say that 2010 is a pivotal year where slow-moving planets cross into new astrological signs and make precise alignments with each other that may only happen in a generation.  Astrologer Theodore White outlines these transits and may be summarized:  One explanation of the current and coming transits “The Astrological Year of 2009 will undoubtedly be the first full year of the beginning of the transition from the legacy world of the 20th century, into the new era of the 21st century.”   His analysis of the transits of 2010 can b found here.

Of course one does not have to be an astrologer to read the signs, they are popping up everywhere .  Whether we believe that an asteroid or nuclear war will take us out, that the sun or the caldera in Yellowstone will explode, that Jesus or the madhi will return or that we will degenerate in  civil war, famine and survival of those that build underground bunkers, the negative scenarios abound.  And the positive scenarios are just as plentiful but possibly not as well known.

One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small

We may be consciously choosing our pill with adherence to a belief or a fear.  If not we unconsciously choose it with the things that we put out attention on.

And who is Alice?  Alice could be anyone.  I submit that we each have the ability to choose those that we will ask for help or to motivate us.  We can gain insight from those that have survived hard times or found strength in tragedy.  There are many everyday wounded healers among us, in our literature, history and traditions.   These strong ones are not of any particular religion or philosophy or belief system, they are in all of them.

When one falls down the rabbit hole of hard times there may not be many options but despair is not an automatic consequence.  The path may not be easy but it need not be hopeless.

Feed your head does not have to be about psychedelics but can be about the thoughts and attitudes we choose to put there.

Go ask Alice.