Claire Joy and astrologer Rico Baker believe 2012 will be a different kind of year. Photo by Chip Scheuer.
Inside the Herb Room on Mission Street, home to holistic remedies like Sweet Bee Magic Cream, a beaming man who calls himself Word Smith (and has the business cards to prove it) is working the cash register. Word Smith is taking a special interest in this new year. Not because he’s some crackpot who thinks the world is going to burst into flames on Dec. 21; he thinks anyone predicting the end of the world is missing the most important part of the picture. But those people who think this will be a normal year? They’re wrong too, he says.
“The world is going to undergo some pretty significant changes,” says Smith, standing in the Herb Room’s tiny parking lot on break from his afternoon shift. “Especially in the way people interact with each other on an emotional level.” It could be an exciting year or it could be a frightening one, he says. It all depends on your perspective.
On Dec. 21, 2012, the Mayan calendar ends its 5,125–year cycle, and some people have theorized it could be the end of times. Independence Day director Roland Emmerich capitalized on the concept with his 2009 sci-fi flick 2012, in which super-sciencey solar flares heat up Earth’s core, unleashing massive volcanoes, earthquakes and flooding. One scene has giant cement arks built to save humanity bobbing against Everest’s summit. It was the world’s fifth-highest grossing film that year, leading some educated folk to believe that the world had, in fact, already ended and landed them squarely in Hell.
But the movie version is not actually the one that the 2012 believers we interviewed subscribe to. Smith’s view, for example, epitomizes a quintessentially Santa Cruz approach to looking at 2012—that it won’t be the end of the world but instead a reawakening. Perhaps our world will undergo massive transformations, he says. Maybe it will never be the same.
Spinning in Circles
According to Smith, who has done some light reading on Mayan culture, “People’s emotions and their mood will reflect their external experience” as never before. If people are angry, they’ll be surrounded by things that make them angry, he says. “And if I’m joyful and willing to help people, [my experience] will actually reflect that. “
Smith asserts that 2012 is kicking off a rise in consciousness that will accelerate through the year. Because of the start of a new Mayan cycle, changes that would have taken hundreds of years can now happen in just months, he says. And changes that would have taken years can now happen in a matter of seconds.
“It’s the cyclic nature of reality, pretty much,” he says.
And then you have your temporal vortex shift and all that entails. With the new cycle, Smith predicts human experience will return from outside time’s large vortex back to the center, meaning it will take society less time to complete a circle on the inside of the vortex than when we were traveling around its edge.
So… time is going to move faster? “In a sense. It’s really consciousness,” Smith explains, shortly before his boss pulls him back inside to help with a post-lunch shopping rush. “But since time is consciousness, it’s the same thing.”
Cross The Universe
Professional astrologer Rico Baker doesn’t just think the world is poised for big change in 2012. Based on personal research, he thinks Santa Cruz could be an epicenter for it. “2012 has been kind of a growing phenomenon for me going back quite a ways,” says Baker, who dates his interest back to 1988.
When he looked at the way the planets are squaring off in our solar system, Baker says, he began to take the Mayan calendar more seriously. He says the astrological signs spell turbulent times and lots of growth between now and 2016, with more polarization and more unrest à la the Occupy movement.
Baker says the thing that sets Santa Cruz apart is its name, which literally means “Holy Cross.” To him that’s significant; he says Pluto and Uranus have been making crosses in the sky since the 1960s, and that’s made for big changes over the past 50 years. “The cross also emphasizes the center because it’s where the two planes cross,” says Baker. “So, it was pretty easy to put that together.”
When it comes to exactly what changes Santa Cruz-as-epicenter is in for, Baker isn’t sure. His answers are a little vague. He thinks there will be a lot more push-and-pull politically. And he says 2012 will bring another onslaught of financial problems (though a number of people may have intuited that one already).
As Baker talks, his wife of four years, Claire Joy, listens intently. She thinks everyone should have an astrologer. “It’s even better to be married to one,” she says.
Even, apparently, if the news is gloomy: Baker says the end of this Mayan period is the planet’s darkest moment in a 26,000-year rotation because Earth’s axis will point at the center of the Milky Way. He says the fact that it falls on the darkest day of the year gives the moment added significance. “This is the very winter of our discontent, you might say,” he grins.
Fire In The Poll
Susan Heinz, like Baker, works as a professional astrologer. She also writes for the Aptos-based Connection Magazine.
Heinz says that Uranus and Pluto, which have been dancing in cross-like shapes since the 1960s, will make their first complete square this year—something they haven’t done since the American Revolution. She says when they make squares, it means big changes for our world.
“It’s like labor pains before a new birth,” says Heinz from her upstairs Pacific Avenue studio as the sun sets over downtown Santa Cruz. “For me it’s nothing about the end of the world. They say humanity has the habit of [requiring] crisis in order to awaken.”
Heinz is making a few predictions: global financial crises aren’t going anywhere; neither is the political unrest that drove the Occupy movement or the Arab Spring; Newt Gingrich will be the Republican nominee; and President Obama will win reelection in a messy race reminiscent of the 2000 Bush v. Gore nightmare.
And things don’t look good for U.S. senators and representatives, either, she says. “You don’t need an astrologer to tell you this, but it looks like Congress—they’re going to get voted out,” says Heinz.
Mayan Malarkey
Not surprisingly, skeptics are rolling their eyes. One of them, UC–Santa Cruz philosophy professor Nancy Abrams—who Baker actually credits with bringing heightened cosmic awareness to town—gives pretty much zero credence to 2012 theories.
Abrams says the world has real issues to worry about. With a skyrocketing population, dwindling natural resources and climate change, the planet faces plenty of problems that can only be tackled by science.
“I hate it when they focus on this Mayan stuff,” says the forthright Abrams, who co-authored The View from The Center of the Universe and The New Universe and The Human Future with her husband, UCSC astrophysicist Joel Primack.
Astrology is also pointless, Abrams says. She notes that since the earth’s axis turns like a spinning top (thanks to a phenomenon called precision), it points in a different direction than it did 2,000 years ago, when the Babylonians created the signs. That means everyone’s sign is about one notch off. “No matter how subtle or nuanced people’s interpretations may be, it’s basically poetic. It has nothing to do with science,” says Abrams.
So where does all this leave the 2012 agnostic? Maybe the best place to look for wisdom is at the door of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who was pondering the nature of things at about the time this Mayan calendar cycle was reaching its midway point. Change is ever present in the universe, Heraclitus said. And in these times, that might be the most frightening—or reassuring—thought possible, depending on your perspective.
