Beltane                                                                                 Rushing Waters Moon

This is a record breaking snow already and it’s barely gotten started. Good news for us up here on Shadow Mountain. Hard to burn when everything’s covered in fluffy white moisture. This is a flour sifter snow, coming down straight, no wind, and fast.

Trump. He says with “surety” that no politician in history has ever been treated worse. Not sure Charles II would agree. Or JFK, MLK, RFK, Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Mandela, Salvador Allende, Archduke Ferdinand. To mention a few off the top of my head.

His first hundred days might be his last hundred days. Even Pence looks better. Sort of.

Over the last couple of days I’ve been reading the Divergent trilogy by Veronica Roth. Granddaughter Ruth is reading it and I try to keep up with at least some of her favorites. The first book is very good. The second one’s not quite as good, but ok. The third shows it’s difficult to sustain a creative push. Makes me wonder how George Martin’s done it with the Game of Thrones series. Not easy.

Still dealing with the difficulties of making tea at altitude. Just wrote my favorite tea company, Verdant Tea, a Minnesota company that works directly with tea growers in China. Maybe they’ll have some ideas.

Kate spent another sewing day yesterday, this time with the needleworkers. These are most of the day events where the women come together to work on their own projects, see what the others are up to and share ideas, techniques. Friendships, too. She also had her third injection of Remicade, an anti-rheumatoid arthritis biological drug. Her color and energy has improved. Seems to be working.

Well. Breakfast time in the Rockies. With snow.

Spring                                                              New (Rushing Waters) Moon

Winter                                                    Cold Moon

Morpheus continues to elude me. Not sure where he goes, but I wake up, or never fall asleep at odd points throughout the night. Getting old.

I’m going to devote the day after the inauguration to reviewing files I’ve saved in an Evernote folder titled, Fighting Trump. I’ll be looking for a way to act over and against the flood of plunder monkeys (Stephen King) taking up residence in the White House and various cabinet posts.

All politics is local as former speaker of the house Tip O’Neill was fond of saying, so whatever I find will need to have a close connection to Colorado. Could be sagebrush rebellion and public lands related. Maybe immigration. Water policy. National parks. Could be something else. Not sure yet. Need allies, too. Perhaps at Beth Evergreen. Perhaps Progressive Colorado. Perhaps Climate Change action.

Winter                                                                             Cold Moon

How often do we get chances to start over? I guess no more than a couple of times a day. I know, sounds like too little, eh? Maybe you’re right. Let’s go with, oh say, infinite chances. Why? Because each moment brings a choice, paths that you can take from that place to a next one. And, each time you have a choice, you can choose. Differently.

Now you’ll probably say that the baggage carrying you to this moment isn’t amenable to being sloughed off, ignored, put in the past. You’re right. Even on a new path you carry the backpack filled with prior choices. Such a load can be heavy, weighing you down, making forward or sideways or diagonal movements seem sluggish or downright impossible. Or, you can choose to set the backpack down. Just leave it. It won’t matter. All that’s in it is from yesterday or further away in time. Its content will stay there and if you need something, go back and pick it up. After all, it’s your baggage. So, recommendation here: left luggage for your weight.

All right. Now that you’ve made a new choice, gone down a different path, jettisoned the constraints you imagined held you back, get on with it. Afraid? That’s ok. Fear is a clue. You’re alive. The way ahead is uncertain. But, think about it. The way ahead is always uncertain. If fact, we all have to realize that there may be no way ahead. The next moment may find us in the grave. So, given the choice between the grave and doing something you fear–which means you are still alive–you can choose to be, if not brave, at least rugged.

And guess what? Once you’ve gone ahead and made that speech, gone for that interview, told that person how you really feel, jumped off the high board, walked into that first class, settled in your seat for the flight to Nepal, you’re ready for your next choice. And the one after that. And the one after that. You’re free to choose the rest of your life. May as well.

Winter                                                Cold Moon

Winter                                                   Moon of the Winter Solstice

I know the usual thing is to focus on the victory of the sun, the gradual return of the light that begins after this evening. That’s why we have all the brave festivals of the light in the month or so leading up to the Winter Solstice. They are ritual pleas for just that victory. We need the sun for sustenance and can never afford its absence. The darkness, both in a nightly sense and especially in a foreboding, possibly apocalyptic sense grips us at a primal level, the darkness of the grave.

Still. The Winter Solstice is my favorite holiday for the opposite reason. It represents the zenith of darkness in the solar year and I love it for that. I take it as the delivery on the promissory note given on September 29th, Michaelmas. Michaelmas as I’ve noted here before is, according to Rudolf Steiner (as flagged now long ago by friend Tom Crane), the spring time of the soul. The Winter Solstice is the soul’s midsummer, the time when  seeds planted in the soul during late summer and early fall have taken root and begun to flourish.

Take time on this, the longest night, to wonder. Take time to weed your soul’s garden, pulling out and discarding pointless tasks, burdens taken on that no longer make sense. You also weed by asking for forgiveness, by making amends. For your ideas to flourish you need a mental space as unburdened as possible by the mistakes and missteps of the past.

Encourage yourself in the quiet of the solstice night. Go back through the last few months and find those things that you’ve done well. Note them. Think of good deeds, selfless deeds you’ve done. Remember what in you made them possible. This night is for you, a time to recollect and reinforce.

Take time with yourself and be happy you exist. I actually saw just this phrase, be happy you exist, on a Roman grave marker in Constanta, Romania.

Samain                                                                                Thanksgiving Moon

It’s here! It’s here! Election day is finally here! The Forever Campaign will, hopefully, end today. Like watching the Chicxulub meteor arrive in slow motion. We know it’s coming, but we have no idea whether this will be an extinction level event or just a local catastrophe. That is, will it wipe out the entire country or just one party? I have no idea.

After following this campaign with amazement and dismay for nearly 18 months, I want to throw my hands up in the air, real high, take a deep breath, then assume the fetal position. No, not really.

Here’s my takeaway so far. The mud-wrestling over the arc of this campaign has obscured its significant implications. It’s not really about Trump vs. Clinton, or Republican vs Democrat. This election is about owning the distressing realities of late-stage capitalism. Creative destruction has been wrought by structural changes in international markets, robotic workers, an educational system lagging far behind these transitions, the abysmal economic collapse of 2008 and the long overdue bill for institutionalized racism having arrived in the morning mail. Those with the most significant unearned advantage in our culture: white men and women with no college education have suffered severe dislocation as a result.

The emergence into the public square of these matters is long overdue. The GOP “values” voter emphasis collected into the big tent a whole constituency of people who, economically speaking, should have been Democrats. While the Republicans cynically deployed the fears and prejudices of poor and working class whites (No gay marriage, no abortion, they’re coming to take away our guns), their elites used the political punch they gained to cut taxes for the wealthy, to give more and more latitude to corporate America (see Citizen’s United, for example) and put us into a Forever War with the Middle East.

What Trump did was strip away the elitist package of policies supported by the wealthy Republicans and lift up the real economic struggles of what is becoming a white underclass. I’m not saying he did that with any intention of rectifying the problems. No, in fact, I believe the opposite; but, as a demagogue, he tuned into the pain of the left behind. Their pain is real; his candidacy as advocacy for solutions to that pain is not. He’s the political equivalent of an opiod, temporary pain relief with no therapeutic effect on the underlying problem

We have a generation, maybe more, of citizens who are failing to find purchase in our economy. Institutional racism explains the ongoing marginalization of people of color while economic disadvantage locks them into its results. What is somewhat new is the marginalization of under and uneducated whites. I say somewhat because white poverty has always surpassed, in strictly numerical terms, all other groups in our country.

What has changed? The myth of upward mobility, so often used to pacify working class white ambitions, especially working class white males, has been unveiled, unmasked. There is no ladder out of a life with a high-school education, not in this economy. And, the largest number of voting age Americans fall in the white, no college demographic.

There is an opening here, though I don’t how to exploit it, for a traditional political approach: increase unemployment benefits, fund job transition education programs, create regulatory advantages for unions, ensure housing and medical care for all persons shut out of jobs with a real living wage. These policies should function as solutions for  no college whites, and no college people of color, too.

My fervent hope is that this election forces us as a nation to confront, together, these problems. If it does, it will have been worth the weirdness.