Before an earthquake or major natural calamity you will see creatures fleeing well before the event. Natural instinct picks up strange and variable energies that alert the fauna to eminent disaster and danger.

We humans, so ensconced in our reliance on technology, lackadaisical attitudes towards imminent danger unobserved usually suffer the consequences of resultant events. These do take place in the natural world around us as with earthquakes, floods and war, yet when it comes to our own environment, our relationships, community or an individual’s actions and their outcomes we so often are blindsided, taken by utter surprise and again suffer the ensuing consequences.

Technology endeavours hard to solve the seeming irresolvable. We expect solutions to be invented, created out of necessity and most often look to others to accomplish these feats. That may be practical in many cases however denying our own resolving tools is folly at best.

Within each of us we have such repositories to draw on that can chart the progression of such events thus mitigating the oft felt calamity on us and those around us.

It is very hard to make someone hear who wishes to remain deaf to a proposal. It is nigh impossible to persuade another who staunchly sticks their head in the sand and refuses all outside advice and help. These end up being veritable lost causes, frustrating as that may be.

However each of us is gifted with insight. Insight needs respect of the highest order. It needs clarity gained through acknowledging it and demands determined work out to develop its sharpest features. A tool left in the potting shed to be ravaged by the damp and cold will never be brought out burnished. Likewise our intuition so often neglected and given little due as to its worth needs polishing.

One visceral part of intuition, a helper if you will is the ever present signs and portents flying around us through such a multiplicity of avenues it can sometimes be bewildering. It is in honing our intuitive faculties through observation, critical thought and an ever present desire to question more that enables us to decipher signs and portents offered.

For many these two aids look as if they ought to be left in the entrails and mythic past where we are told they had their day. Foolish is the one who would believe these misguided advices. While all around us they show themselves in event presenting metaphors for life we ignore them at our peril, especially believing science can unravel for us what determined work on ourself would otherwise accomplish.

Nothing is ever a straight line, yet straight lines are part of the journey. Nothing is ever black and white, yet these two tonal areas are part of the whole. The spectrum of things is by its nature and design a map of full coverage in the visible and tangible parts.

What exists in the intangible, the unseen, the far too refined parts is anyone’s guess. Just because we cannot see it, does not negate its existence. What it does demand is our trust and faith that what we know, see, feel and experience is merely scratching a surface that contains far more depth and breadth than we could imagine. That in itself should be enough to blow our minds.

Why it may not is the result of our awe and wonder having been beaten out of us through frivolity, acceptance of superficiality and rank ignorance of the vastness of our individual and collective potential. We have allowed ourselves to be driven, like a nail, into the coffin of our self inflicted shortsightedness and smallness. This sort of neutering leads to mass extinction yet is never inevitable if we are open to learning about ourselves in a far more meaningful and passionate way.

The path is fearsome, in a positive awe inspiring sense of the word. We are adept at scaring ourselves shitless – we do it on a daily basis and allow others to feed our fears by the minute. This is our greatest enemy when it comes to wishing to develop our intuitive potency. It is what blocks our vision both inner and outer to the signs and portents that line the road we travel. They become the essential billboards advertising the potential ahead for success or failure.

Signs and portents are our guides, if we but knew it or accepted them as such, yet they need us to be willing to dig deep into ourselves and clear the dross of false belief, baggage preventing our vision seeing clearly and anything that would prevent us being objectively able to appraise information before us. It is this for many that makes them discard all this as itchy witchy nonsense. But as previously stated retraining a fool is as hard  as Sisyphus rolling his rock uphill for it to roll back down again and again.

The self serving fools who pretend to govern over us exude a power and control most accept as the right of the job, rarely questioning the sanity of what is demonstrated. Ego maniacs, psychopaths and all who abuse their power and position inevitably create actions spurring reactions leading to disasters, suffering and eventually their own demise. Wherever it may come from nature very often through utilising human interaction on whatever level delivers warnings, prohibitions and insights as to future results. In a way that much science happily kicks into the long grass while they hold no solution within their parameters of documentation, human and natural forces are so intricately entwined as to flag up when the human part goes against the grain and interdependence of such a relationship. When we push our arrogance to playing god within the natural arena, the discord created holds dire consequences. Arrogance and stupidity blind us from such consequences until only when the outcomes hit us full on do we begin to question whether our approach could be more sympathetic to the whole.

This article was spurred by witnessing a small island in the Maldives combusting, destroying the whole eco built paradise retreat for the rich and well heeled. As of writing there is little or no loss of life thankfully, yet the metaphor in the signs presented is of this sort of exclusive life style being as impertinent and able to be destroyed in an instant as anything.

There are far more obvious and telling signs and portents witnessed. The Grenfell Tower disaster, so man made, so fuelled by self serving greed and disdain for those far more deprived issued a stark and unequivocal reminder of our polarised society between the haves and have nots. These signs screamingly obvious to even those half asleep have yet to be taken on board and become a positive litmus test for deep problems boiling up like puss under the skin. Ignoring such signs build to create massive counter reactions.

As much as our abuse of our environment is a major disaster already in full throttle, we are forced to accept at it as ultimate cause of so many of our woes. Yet to contextualise it into a cycle as long and as natural as the earth itself might allow us to realise it is being used as a rod to beat us with far more than a carrot to lead us through the darkness of ignorance. That more is not addressed in this area is down to lack of foresight, desire to care for others born and unborn and sheer bloody selfish ways. We give away our power as if it was not ours to hold in the first place. Selfish wants supersede selfless need at every level of action and interaction. Cultivating blame, dividing each against the other are classic redirection tools avoiding the realities we share and face.

Why does it always have to reach a point where the creatures we are supposedly meant to steward  and care for wash up with more plastic inside them on our shores than food in their bellies? Even these signs and portents of our imminent extinction are brushed aside at this eleventh hour and a half as merely results of a poverty of invention.

An intuitive can feel, sense imbalance, developing sickness yet if that is overridden by staunch disbelief in the numinous and inner rather than accepting insight as part of the proactive measures to realign, it falls impotent on rocky ground. Intransigence and unwillingness to explore the inner as well as outer is a killer for anything approaching intuition and natural alertness.

Today is so filled with the noise of distraction, interference with natural resonance that it can be tricky to negotiate. We are brilliant at telling ourselves the things we cannot do, yet rarely decide on the can do path which always reveals what we can.

Belief in self, grounded in solid practice and practicality, determination linked to respect for our environment are solid foundations. Listening within and without for subtle change and direction, honouring space with as little interference from technology all leads to the development of heightened awareness. When we begin to feel as alert and receptive to our surroundings as the hare and antelope then we have opened a door that will only close when we fall back into dullness and stupor.

Synchronicity and happenstance are both instruments to be highly respected. That science may not place heavy weight on them is science’s loss. If we allow ourselves to open to the possibility and potential revealing itself to us through ways and means we had previously no idea of then this is one good sign that we are inviting intuition to take its rightful front seat in our lives. The rewards will always surprise yet will have been well earned and as natural as the air we breathe.