Winter and the Valentine Moon
Thursday gratefuls: Origins of North America. Canada. Oh, Canada. Mid-Continent Rift. Keweenaw Peninsula. The U.P. Porcupine Mountains. Copper mined by indigenous folk. Isle Royale. The Upper Midwest. My home turf. Rocky Mountains. My home. Sun through the Lodgepoles. Snow hanging around. Solar Snow shovel failing us right now. More cold to come.
Sparks of joy and awe: Cold
Cold air feels pure to me. As if all the sneeze causing stuff has been cleared away. As if its source were a temple mountain to the Goddess of all things clear and refined. Compare it to the muggy, insect and dust laden heat of a Midwestern summer. Cold air brings sleep. Hot air robs sleep. Part of my ongoing love affair with living at altitude, in Minnesota. Traveling in Canada.
Kate and I both loved the cold. Were happiest in the winter months. Except for the chance to garden that only heat and Sun brings. Oh those gardening days. Halcyon. At least in memory. No wonder Elysian fields, Paradise (a walled garden). Where we humans and the Earth are openly, even gleefully in symbiosis. No wonder farmers don’t want to quit.
Learning about synclines and anticlines, Cratons, native Copper, room and pillar mining, truck thumpers that produce seismic waves for investigation of the geological. The sheer joy of a person who loves his subject matter. What fun. Also, I don’t have to do anything except listen. Look. Think. What I needed at this point.
You’ve probably noticed I’ve stopped posting photographs and images. Took too much extra time and exposed me to the occasional wrong footing of using an image under copyright. Having said that I’m going to post this picture anyhow:
The hunter in this picture is a former Bronco’s defensive linesman. (a big guy in other words) This Mountain Lion got tagged by Colorado Wildlife officials for killing dogs. Lots and lots of commentary on this. Mostly negative. But. It was a legal hunt done under state auspices. Last week.
Not around Shadow Mountain but not far from here either. I wanted you to see the size of this animal. Not something to be trifled with. A wild neighbor, probably weakened in some way by injury or disease so focused on easy to catch prey.
Can you see the debt ceiling from where you are? It’s pretty high up. The economics of nation states is a mystery to me. I know it’s not at all the same as your budget or mine, an error made by conservatives quite often. For one thing nation states can print money. I can’t. On the other hand like Everett Dirksen famously said, I’m paraphrasing here: A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.
Current national debt is somewhere north of thirty-two trillion dollars. Here’s a site that explains it.
Gosh that’s a lot. Eh?
Our form of government, far from the only one, is in danger right now of losing the mandate of heaven by basing its survival on the mandate of money. The weird part is that many folks most damaged by the mandate of money are the ones rebelling against the old democratic regime. Yes, it was a center right thing all along, but at least some progress got made and people weren’t dying by the thousands. So here we have the strange circumstance of rebels insisting on more corporate influence, more oligarchic rule, yet rebels whose own jobs are often in jeopardy.
In the U.S. however the oligarchs have a situation where the white population sees its share of the population shrinking, the sort of jobs its middle and working class depended on disappearing, while increasingly restive ethnic politics like Black Lives Matter strengthen the influence of the non-white population. The road to power still runs through the valley of white privilege though for how long is anybody’s guess. Uncertainty feeds the politics of ressentiment. Ressentiment is “a psychological state arising from suppressed feelings of envy and hatred that cannot be acted upon…” Oxford online dictionary.
African-Americans and perhaps to a lesser extent Latinos look to different Mandates. African-Americans had the mandibles of slavery instead of a Mandate of Heaven. Latinos had sufferance for agricultural work, but met resistance to permanent immigration. Both hope for a new Mandate of Heaven whose arc of acceptance would include them. In the eyes of these communities the American Mandate of Heaven, its Manifest Destiny, has brought them suffering and oppression, not good crops and disease free villages.
It may be time to give up the shibboleth of democracy and ask the hard question: Is this an effective form of government for our time, for all of our people? If the answer is no, as I think it must be, then what form of government will serve all of us? This might be the real question rather than trying to prop up a republic with arcane rules that serve the rich and not the poor.
Friday gratefuls: Tina at Morry’s Neon. Master Benders. Fun. Making the house mine. Finding Morry’s Neon, an urban pathfinding adventure. Jon. Cardio. Gut bombs. Jodi coming today. New washer coming on Monday. None too soon. Cities. I love them. But no longer want to live in them. The Pandamndemic. Orgovyx. Prostate Cancer.
Then, when Tina flipped a switch, look what showed up. Could have been Times Square or the Vegas Strip. I love neon and neon signs.
I hope I’m wrong; but, when I look at the world’s response to Covid, a clear and present danger, it’s difficult to imagine a dramatic response to the Climate crisis, a more subtle one, though becoming less so every week.
Geez. Debbie downer today. The 5 of wands might reflect this undercurrent: “Conflict, disagreements, competition, tension, diversity.” “The Five of Wands meaning could also be a personal struggle that you are dealing with on your own. This can be on a number of issues that affect you, hence you need to address them and find a solution for them.” Or, a more positive note: “…the Five of Wands in the present position is a validation of all your planning and confirms what you have earned.”
Through immersion in the natural world as guided by the Great Wheel and through immersion in the ten thousand things as guided by the Tao, I have become nimble, yet solid. Able to feel a wave, even a tsunami like Kate’s death, wash through me and experience cleansing rather than high anxiety.
