Samain Healing Moon
Just a quick note about election day. I’m holding my psychic breath, not giving in to watching returns, following exit polls. I’ve peeked a bit on the NYT and Real Clear Politics, but when I feel myself drawn in, I move on. Perhaps it’s a very mild from of post-traumatic stress. Not the disorder, but a real aversive conditioning based on 2016. My understanding of American politics betrayed me that day. And the reality and depth of that betrayal has morphed into the lived reality of Trump’s awful Presidency. So, a trauma based stress reinforced daily in ways I still cannot believe.
Politics in this two year time frame have become repugnant to me. I consider myself clear eyed about the nature of politics. It was, ante-Trump, neither wholly good nor wholly evil. It was human, rooted in hopes and ideals, greed and self-interest. It was malleable. Politics was a way of sorting through our public dreams, deciding which ones to nourish, which ones to kill off.
Vietnam cured me of any illusions about the essential decency of politics, but it did not leave me jaundiced. Instead I felt the Vietnam protests and the counter-culture of that era made a real difference. No, not in a straight line from hopes to policies, but in the way American life took notice of new ways of thinking about war and its justification, about gender, about careers, music, art.
Of course there was always the KKK. The Minutemen. The Posse Comitatus. Waco. Ruby Ridge. But they were fringe actors, limning the boundaries of decency by their cross burnings, cult indoctrination, creation of strange understandings of the law. Now these fringe actors have moved center stage. Their abhorrent doctrines have currency, no longer defining boundaries decent folk will not cross, but helping define policy emanating from the White House. Build that wall. Send troops to “defend” America against poor people fleeing their homes, families with children just hoping to live out their days in peace. Give aid to our enemies and the finger to our allies. This is way, way beyond anything I ever imagined.
What will I do if it’s not repudiated at the polls today? I really don’t know. Perhaps retreat into isolation, even though the idea would close off a long dedication to social change. Perhaps recommit to some kind of radical vision. Don’t know. And in not knowing I do not know myself, do not know the one who feels that way. That scares me, BTW.
Wanted to get this down before the results finally roll in. Where I am now.
“While laying over in the Detroit airport today I saw a fellow wearing a T-shirt with a caricature of an alien on it with the text: “Please don’t take me to your leader” ” Friend Tom Crane
My gut tells me that if a blue wave sweeps the country, perhaps especially if it’s a tsunami, we’ll have an even more divided nation afterward. I read an essay that suggested a win by the Democrats, taking the House back for example, might help Trump in 2020. Gag.
The last years of my third phase will, it seems, be lived in a world riven by the politics of fear and baked by a climate heated by our own stupidity. Not exactly a rosy picture. And, not one that can be ignored. In one sense our generation, the oft derided baby boom, is now a deposit of memory, memory of a time when politics, while far from perfect, were not ruled by disinformation and a heightened sense that the other was about to steal your job and your life.
Samain. The end of summer. The end of fall. The end of the growing season. The time of quiet and darkness and cold. Ushered in here on Shadow Mountain with 6 or 7 inches of wet snow. Welcome. Winter has come.
The wings of the angel of death hover, whirring. They brush the air past our souls. We feel it, a faint quiver. He is never far away, never at rest, never near the end of his duty. Murders, catastrophes like Tree of Life, Pulse, Columbine, 9/11 are not awful because people die. We all die. They are awful because these are lives ended too soon, with malice, through hatred and venality.
On this day, Samain, summer’s end, the season of vitality, growth, the season which replenishes those things we need to sustain life comes to a close for another cycle. As it does, we remember those whose vitality and presence shaped our own lives, just as later, after our deaths, others will remember us. I suppose this could sound grim, but I don’t experience it that way. I’m more of the Mexican, Latin American spirit in this regard.
The weather gods have chosen an apt offering for the last day of fall, 8 inches of snow. In true Colorado fashion it will probably be here tonight and tomorrow, gone by Thursday if not late Wednesday. Looking forward to it. A difference between Colorado and Minnesota exists in forecasting snow. Here in Colorado people pant for the snow, welcome it, do celebratory dances. In Minnesota, not so much. It means work and slick roads in the Gopher State; here snow means beauty, tourist dollars, and will be gone conveniently.
Astrology. Judaism has its weird side. Kabbalah, in particular. Turns out the kabbalist’s support astrology and if you follow the story of creation from a kabbalistic perspective, you can see why they might. At the shattering, the sharding of the divine light, ohr, pieces of divinity divided into minute pieces, atoms you might call them, and since then have created and recreated everything in the universe. That means that all things are connected, as part of the original attempt to create an undivided holy creation. In a sense it means that all things yearn for each other, to be rejoined, made whole again.
The concept of the north/south nodes has some connection to the past lives notion, which seems far fetched to me, but I got opened up a bit here, so I was listening. The idea is this: the south node is your default approach to life, the one, if you’re a past lives enthusiast, informed by the accretion of knowledge from other lives you’ve lived. It’s comfortable, effective, easy. But. Not growthful.
I remember MLK: “You can’t legislate feelings, but you can legislate behavior.” It was an admission that changing people’s hearts is work outside the realm of government, but within the public sphere, government’s appropriate responsibility, we can decide what behaviors we will tolerate and which we will not.
In its original manifestation the Feast of Fools served to highlight the norms governing public life by mocking them within a predetermined period of time. Leadership of the chaos went to one obviously unsuited, his actions expected to be unpredictable, coarse, even blasphemous. When the party ended, all went back to normal. The king was in charge, louts were not. And, the difference between the two had been made visible. Rule by louts harms everyone.
When I say we are not a nation that does these things, I do not mean they will never happen. Hardly. I mean we recognize them for what they are, behavior not tolerated. We need to push these people back into their Klan Klosets, push them back into places from which they can grumble, but not rumble.
Kate and I got coffee, sat down at our beetle-kill pine dining table, cracked open the mailers from the state of Colorado, and voted. Not a complicated ballot in terms of candidates, though the retention questions for judges left us both scratching our heads. Guess which way we voted? Blue wave, blue wave, blue wave. At least two water particles added.
Then there were two that make creating both federal and state legislative districts non-partisan. Like campaign funding gerrymandering is currently a cancer in our democracy, both in their own way as serious as the orange tumor in our body politic. Voting yes.
Colorado continues to be a strange political environment to this native Midwesterner. The libertarian streak in all American politics colors issues with a let me alone and don’t make me pay swoosh, here it’s a swoosh often as big as the entire running shoe. That can drive electoral decisions. There’s also the even more dramatic than in most states divide between the liberal Front Range and the remainder of Colorado. Rural and mountain Coloradans often complain that their views are ignored. True, too, to some extent. The rural vote is often reflexively against candidates and ballot measures that seem to reflect Front Range values.
