All this week I've been feeling weird. It obviously hasn't helped that I read the entire post-nuclear war book The Road AND watched the film all in one day. The story is one of the bleakest channellings of another dimension EVER and I got all creeped out, Halloween-style, and was too chicken to hang my laundry out on the line after dark in case cannibals got me. But I digress.

If you're keen to subject yourself to a miserable, unrelenting apocalyptic tale with almost zero hope (gosh, some people are doing it hard out there in the universe), then I would recommend reading Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer prize-winning book rather than watching the film, which was a little weaker.

For some reason, futuristic scary earth stories (Children of Men, I Am Legend, Terminator III) always crawl into my psyche and affect me on a really disturbing level. I must be in a parallel world somewhere dealing with all the radiation and nuclear winters and poisoned air; somehow, I KNOW how it feels to look at flowers and birds and blue skies and think "Remember this, because it's the last time you'll ever see it", and it chills me right through my body. A bit of Googling yesterday turned up an interesting article which claims that a nuclear war was begun in another earth-like dimension in 1988 (our time). This is super-weird, because I can remember attending an anti-nuclear rally in Adelaide in 1987 and reading a book about British children holing themselves up against nuclear bombs which was written (channelled?) in 1985. Wherever that other dimension is, they're now 20 years post-nuclear. I wonder how they're going? Are there any survivors? I'm sure there are, and I bet it ain't pretty. Let's send some love out across the cosmos...

The Road has been dubbed one of the most profound environmental books ever written, because it vividly depicts an earth with no biosphere, animals, or environment. All nature has died - plants, trees, grass, animals, insects - and even the sea is no longer salt, but smells "like iodine". The few remaining humans live in an utterly grey, ashen world where it alternately rains and snows, electrical thunderstorms melt the asphalt and dead trees are beginning to uproot and topple over. All the remaining food has been scavenged years ago, so survivors are lucky to find the odd rusty tin can of veggies. (How long can someone truly survive with no Vitamin D?)

I know this is a far more depressing blog than ANYONE wants to read on a Monday morning, but for three days I haven't been able to shake all these feelings of a cold, dead world, until a girlfriend snapped me out of it. She reminded me that it's all a massive metaphor: something needs to "die" in order for a "rebirth" to occur. What's died, you ask? "This Sunday is Chinese New Year," she reminded me. "That means it's the 'real' start to 2010 -- and don't forget, we just ended the first decade of the 21st century." Ahhhhhhhhhh!, I thought. So that's it! So death and dying is an apt theme this week: we're leaving behind an old phase, the end of an era.

Did anyone else realise that we just completed and left behind an entire DECADE? Who were you in the year 2000? What have you achieved since then? How have you changed? What are you relieved to be leaving behind? The exciting thing here is, it's time to start over with a new clean slate. 2010 is the Year of the White Metal Tiger: ideal for exercising power, authority and leadership. You can be King of the Jungle! ‘This is the year of "8" - money!' And it's significant that Chinese New Year falls on Valentine's Day this year, too - people say it means love and prosperity, and a great year for the world economy.

Take a tip from Chinese astrology and usher the New Year in with a BANG: spring-clean your house and office, sound some bells or chimes (or waft some incense) to clear the air, cook up a feast and transmit positive intention on February 15: it's New Years Day, and whatever you put out NOW will set the tone for the next 12 months! In two short weeks, we'll enter the dead-and-dying month of March (autumn). Phases are finishing. It's time to lay down new patterns. How will you step forward under this New Moon... into what New Phase for the next 10 years?

Happy New Year!