86  bar falls 29.66 3mph N  dew-point 59  sunrise 5:56 sunset 8:42 Summer

Waning Crescent of the Thunder Moon

Lughnasa, August 1st, comes on a new moon night.  This means the first harvest festival of the Celtic year (it ends just before the last harvest festival on October 31st, Samhain.) will coincide with the dark moon.  In some pagan systems the new moon, the dark moon, is a time for introspection, for reflection.  It is a time to consider your life, to meditate and consider new beginnings.  This convergence of Lughnasa and the new moon may make for an interesting holiday.  Look to the Great Wheel posting on August 1st for some thoughts and a description of our celebration in the garden here at home.

Tonight is the second Sierra Club political committee meeting.  More endorsement work and consideration of targets for the up coming election.  I can’t talk about the details, but the political work makes a certain part of me thrum.

Speaking of cycles and elections the fall campaign has begun already.  Obama visited Europe and the Middle East.  McCain visited a German restaurant.   No kidding.  Look it up.  While my broad political sympathies lie with the Obama camp, my particular politics seem distant from the tug and pull of rhetoric which focuses on tax cuts and forcing people to buy medical insurance.  Where are the poor?  The disadvantaged?  The environment does seem to have traction in this race, part of the reason I decided to go with the Sierra Club work, but even there the radical, cut to the true bottom of an issue and deal with that, hears only faint echoes of itself.

Of course, expecting radical solutions from a political/economic system devoted to moderate policy initiatives, policy initiatives often vetted by the very industries and political interests targeted by them, remains, as it always has, an exercise in futility.  I know that.  I see it.  I feel it in my gut.

Which begs the question, why work within it?  Unlike those long ago days of movement politics drugs sex and rock and roll I sense no significant political minority roused.  The environmental advocates, who, if any, should be advancing with some power right now, seem fragmented.  In a moment without a vanguard and in a moment without a popular, even if disorganized, front clambering for change the politics of most use happen within the messy gears of our quasi-democratic process.