Talk and Tales from Coco, Optimist in Charge at The Shiny Butter Blog
Outer peace through inner peace
The thing is, Reader...
It feels like every day is trying to out-crazy the day before it—and that it's getting worse!
It's as though people are more unhinged than ever, more gullible, more angry, more violent, more unfair and divisive, meaner, dumber, number, and on and on. It's certainly not difficult to see the world this way.
I have a theory
The world has always been the same level of nuts that it is now. The same level as always of violent, unfair, and filled with power-hungry, simple-minded, gullible, shallow people, and thieves.
I mean, I have a Tower of London ornament on my Christmas tree. If that's not evidence of decidedly not-better times in the olden days, I don't know what is.
[Click here to see a little 30-second video of my tree—it's very pretty, Tower of London and all.]
What's changed now is how much we see and know, and how quickly things happen, especially the transfer of information.
This magnification makes everything seem worst, and constant surveillance has us overfilled with more than we want or need to know about—we really can't take it.
Nevertheless, human history is chock-full of the same stuff, starting as early as with Adam and Eve when one of their kids killed the other.
Four people on the earth and already a murder!
Even if you view Adam and Eve and their kids as mythical, we still talk about it: the first four people on the earth, and already a murder.
History's been bizarre all along, just slower-moving
It's always been one nutcase after another. One egomaniac after another. One drama and trauma after another, one unfathomable story after another, one tragedy after another—even large-scale versions.
If this were, say, medieval Europe, though, news would just be slower to get to us, and we'd have fewer versions of it, along with a lot fewer opportunities to hear about it.
We'd be traveling to the town square to hear someone on a balcony talk to a crowd of thousands. We'd probably be way, way in the back, counting on hearsay to get the words to us accurately.
It's the same now. We still count on news traveling accurately to us, though it happens at lightning speed now—and in written, audio, and visual versions around the clock and from every corner, no less. It's near-impossible to not feel overwhelmed.
But it's the same stuff as always—all we have to do is read ancient literature to know that humans have apparently always set out each day trying to out-crazy the day before.
Except that something has shifted
While it's been the same stuff on repeat for thousands of years at this point, what'schanged is our collective energy. Our collective consciousness. Our collective awareness of our inner life.
All along we've had humans who've been ahead of the rest of us consciously and vibrationally speaking. They sense more and see more—philosophers, prophets, thought leaders, healers, wise people.
And all along, of course, we've overlooked, discounted, avoided, rejected, and even killed people like this.
Except that now something's shifted, and people are noticing more, feeling more, and connecting to an inner wisdom, to the divine inside.
This flame inside us like a pilot light
We're all running around living our physical, messy lives while there's this flame inside us like a pilot light.
Right this second "every day trying to out-crazy the day before it" is happening alongside the chaos of our collective awakening.
This is what we're feeling and sensing—we're breaking through a chrysalis.
These days feel like a fright because we're witnessing old ways of doing things come apart. We're shaking off old habits, patterns of thought, and beliefs. We're ready to see what we couldn't see before.
Not fast, easy, or necessarily pretty, but the potential for beauty in this awakening instead of more of the kind of unnerving, frightening crazy we've come to expect is enormous.
The buy-in
The catch is that we have to buy into this awakening to experience it.
We have to buy into the fact that nothing changes from the outside. Nothing lasting, that is.
Our might and brains haven't yet fixed what we keep trying to fix by way of forcing our moral and physical superiority on each other. This keeps not working.
The change we really, really want comes from the core of our being, not from being on the "right side" while opposing the "wrong side."
We keep trying, but we'll never be able to fight our way to peace. Seems obvious, but I guess we're slow learners.
How about instead of fighting our way to peace
This physical life will always be just that, which has its ups and downs, pros and cons. We've always known deep inside us, though, that there's something more to this physical life.
We're now beginning to realize how all this works and why we've been groundhog day-ing through history.
We've been coming at this physical life from what appeared to be the business side of things, when all along we've had it backwards.
The business side of life in these bodies is the inside—the divine within us, our inner wisdom, our gut, and our power of creation by use of our intuition and thoughts.
This is the awakening we're experiencing—that all growth, expansion, and positive, lasting change comes from the inside of our being, not from the outside of physical life.
The pilot light has been on the whole time, and we're just now realizing what it's for. What a glorious time to be alive. 🔥
Thank you for sharing your screen with me today
Enjoy this last week of short, short days as we approach the return of light, the winter solstice on December 21st.
Let's talk human to human, because we all need more than AI's faux humanity—we need each other. We need real humans who have real feelings. We need real faces and real voices in our life. We don't need another computer program in our life—we need someone who listens with human ears and a human heartbeat.
I don't use AI for writing. My aim in all my writing is to be as real, human, and fully alive as possible—and to share my very real, human, fully alive experience with my readers and audience.
I love me some shiny things, but with all of AI's promises and assurances, I still choose the slow, hands-on, manual, analog, self-reliant, old-school, defiantly non-plagiarized path of writing—without asking any form of AI for ideas, inspiration, help, or even proofreading and grammar correction (because I've discovered it's not as good or "intuitive" as it claims to be at those, either).
[Also, as of 5/6/25 all photos are my own (not stock) unless otherwise stated.]
