Summer and the Greenhouse Moon II (Full)
Thursday gratefuls: Shadow, the outdoor girl. Artemis ready to receive plantings for a fall garden. Halle. Capybaras. Marmots. Nutria. Mice. Cool morning Breezes. Mezuzah. The ritual for hanging them. Monism. Squirrels. Tarot. The Forest Lovers. Wild Neighbors screeing. Rain incoming. What did the idiot do today?
Sparks of Joy and Awe: Wind and Rain
Week Kavannah: Hearing on the side of merit
Tarot pick: Forest Lovers, #6 of the major arcana
One brief shining: This morning I shuffled the Wildwood deck, cut it three times, and asked the deck what I needed to do about Shadow, my mystery girl, and it gave me this card, the Forest Lovers, the male and female energy present on Beltane, the start of the growing season.
Dog journal: A hot night. Mid sixties. Shadow outside yet again. Once again challenging my vision of our relationship. How it should go. At night in particular.
Last night we were having a hug on the small patio stones outside my back door. We shifted our stance a bit and I stepped on her left rear back paw. She yelped and ran off. No way she was coming in last night. No words, no apologies. I hurt her. She left. Fast.
Better this morning. I think she knew it was an accident, but her love of freedom and being her own Dog wouldn’t allow an immediate reconciliation. Damn it! Neither of us needed that.
The Forest Lovers. Drawing this card made me see that as I’ve wondered and as Tom suggested yesterday the wu wei here, the flow of the chi, may entail letting her stay outside at night.
I need to get an assessment of how much danger Natalie believes Shadow is in at night. From Mountain Lions. I believe the threat is low, but the consequence of being wrong is catastrophic.
We are yin and yang. I need her feminine energy in my life and she needs my masculine energy. Together we can bring out parts of ourselves that would lay dormant otherwise. The most confounding experience I’ve ever had with a Dog.
Life insights: A family of teachers. Mom. Mary. Mark. Several cousins. I’ve often wondered why I didn’t become a teacher, too. When graduate school slipped out of the picture, I never pursued teaching again.
Except. As an organizer, it was my job to teach people how to live into their power. When unemployment had reached crisis levels in 1988 Minnesota, I along with others recruited church leaders, union activists, and unemployed people across the work spectrum.
Once in a room together, with an 18 month old Joseph on my hip, I drew from them their anguish, their anger and frustration. This was the fuel for them to come together against a common foe: an unfair labor market.
Once we identified those emotions, we moved to using our various strengths. The moral power of the church. The organizing power of the unions. And the willingness to put it all on the line of the unemployed.
The Jobs Now Coalition came into existence. Together we convinced the Minnesota Legislature to pass M.E.E.D. The Minnesota Emergency Employment act which funded half of a new hires pay for their first six months.
It still exists: Jobs Now Coalition.