Monthly Archives: December 2020

Commentary on the news, Holidays, Myth and Story, Politics, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

New Light. New Year. New Hope.

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Winter and the Moon of the New Year

Christmastide, Day 6: Hogmanay, New Year’s Eve

Thursday gratefuls: Tony’s Market. Easy Entrees. Subway. Resistance work. Cardio. 5:30 am wake up. Jon, Ruth, Gabe. The folks who write dramas like Ray Donovan, Janet King, His Dark Materials, Raised by Wolves, Professor and the Madman. Actors, too. The Internet. Servers. 20 days until January 20th at 9 am. Vaccines. Covid. Trump.

 

 

Ding, Ding, Bells o’ the Barony!

Ding! Ding! Hogmanay harmony.

Naebody greets for the year thats awa’

W.D. Cocker, the Auld Year   p. 188, Matthews

(This ditty seemed particularly apt for this decadal turn)

 

Hogmanay is a word of unknown origin. It’s not well known outside of Scotland, but there, it gets celebrated with energy. Christmas is An Nollaig Mohr, the Big Yule, and New Year’s, An Nollaig Bheag, the Little Yule. Yes. But in Scotland it’s the little Yule that gets the bigger celebration.

Folks throng the city streets, drinking early, then drinking all the while it takes to ring in the New Year, and disperse with good cheer not long after.

It’s a day for tending to unfinished business. Mini-spring cleaning. Debts paid. Borrowed items returned. Stockings darned. Tears mended. Clocks wound up. Musical instruments tuned. Pictures hung straight. Brass and silver polished. Fresh linens on the bed.  F. Marian McNeill, the Silver Bough.  Matthews 189.

I like the tradition of first-footing. Darken the house. A family member, or a friend, has a candle, a live flame, and goes outside at the stroke of midnight. A knock on the door and fire crosses the threshold both of your home and the New Year. If you want to go the whole way with this idea, put candles in several rooms and follow the first-footer as they go from room to room lighting the candles.

You might say something like: (Matthews, 190)

Welcome to the light of the New Year

And Welcome is the one who brings it here!

As friend Tom Crane rightly observes, there is no real New Year. The poison and toxicity of the last twelve months will not recede into the past just because the ball drops in (a quiet) Times Square. All the various New Year designations, and they vary a lot by season and date, are human signposts that acknowledge the orbit of our Earth around the Sun.

Yet. Artificial constructs though they may be, New Years acknowledge two important things, at least for me. The first says, yes, our spaceship (thanks, Bucky Fuller) has carried us all the way round our Sol one more time. Unscathed. In this it also acknowledges, even if indirectly, the solar systems flight to the stars, our Milky Way galaxies flight toward Andromeda, and all the other fast movement around us that we cannot even see. Including the earth’s rotation.

The second important thing, symbolized above by first-footing and finishing the unfinished, is that we can start anew. Even though the past is not vanished, neither does it have to determine our future. We can come into the present moment by bringing in fresh light. We can come into the present by getting rid of matters left undone that weigh on us. We can change years by changing ourselves each New Year.

Of course, in this sense, each day, each hour, each moment comes anew. As indeed it does.

Having said all that, and meaning it, I also say, Good Riddance to this bastard child of time, the year 2020. Let’s bring all the bright, original, light we can to this new year, 2021!

 

 

 

Commentary on Religion, Cooking, Great Wheel, Holidays, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

The Grim Boar’s Head Frowned on High

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Winter and the full Moon of the New Year

Christmastide Day 5: Bringing in the Boar

Wednesday gratefuls: The full Moon of the New Year hiding in the West behind the Lodgepoles. Chilly weather, a bit of snow. Mountain high. Spiritual and emotional nourishment. 21 days only. See the bad man leave the house. And go away. All dogs. All people who love dogs. Vaccines. Covid. Page turning. Black Lives Matter. Radical police reform. Economic justice.

 

 

An interesting day, day 5. It celebrates the bringing of a boar head to a great feast.

Then the grim boar’s head

Frowned on high,

Covered with bay and rosemary.

Sir Walter Scott Marmion

Frowned indeed. And odd that it featured/s for so long in the Twelve Days of Christmas. Why? Because boars were apparently extinct during the reign of King Henry II. He died in 1185.

I say features because bringing in the boar’s head still takes place Queen’s College in Oxford. As it comes, verses of this carol are sung:

The Boar’s head in hand bear I

Bedecked with bays and rosemary;

And I pray you, my masters, be merry

Quot estis in convivo. (so many as are in the feast.)

The Boar’s head, as I understand,

Is the rarest dish in all the land

When thus bedecked with a gay garland

Let us servire cantico. (let us serve with a song)

Matthews suggests leaving an apple or an orange at the backdoor in case the bristled one comes by.

Sæhrímnir, the ever renewing boar of Valhalla, feeds all the einherjar, those Vikings fallen in battle and delivered to the great feasting hall by the Valkyries. He dies each night, is eaten, then revives. In this sense there is some link between the boar and resurrection, much like the einherjar themselves, brought from death to life. The einherjar will join Odin in the great final battle of the gods, Ragnarok.

If you had the chance to read Gawain and the Green Knight, you might remember the hunting expeditions of Bertilak de Hautdesert. The boar is the third and final hunt. Bertilak dismounts and fights him in the water, driving his sword straight into the great beast as it attacks.

Boars were considered as dangerous as a human foe with their sharp tusks, more than human strength, and a wiliness that made them difficult to kill.

Even pagans have a conflicted relationship with nature. Yes, she provides soil for crops, rain and sun from them to grow, and game to supplement domesticated animals like goats and cows and chickens. But she also had predators in the wild like wolves and game animals like the boar, who killed many hunters.

Bringing in the boar’s head, in this context, would signal a human victory. A sort of Roman General’s triumph. And, at the same time, it honors the boar as a worthy foe, symbolic of both the danger and the bounty found in the forest.

Tomorrow: Hogmanay (New Year’s Eve)

Aging, Family, Friends, Holidays, Memories, Minnesota

Childhood

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Winter and the Moon of the New Year

Christmastide, Day 3: Holy Innocents, Children

Monday gratefuls: The Ancient ones on wonder. Wonderfull. High humidity outside. Another weather change on the way. 23 days until he has to come on down. 4 days till 2021. Back to workouts today. Covid. Trump. The Absurd. Authenticity. Living into the abyss. Haislet’s poem.

 

Murdoch’s last day at his birth home

 

First. Don’t start anything important today. As was well known a while ago, nothing started on Holy Innocents ever turns out as hoped. In the Middle Ages kings would not be crowned on this day. Two kings, French King Louis XI and English King Edward IV would not conduct any court affairs.

You have been warned.

This day commemorated the children killed by Herod in his slaughter of the innocents and added, over time, an emphasis on all children.

Ruth’s final day at Swigert

There were odd rituals. Parents beat their children with fresh evergreen branches. Sometimes children would beat the parents. Masters, servants. And, servants, masters. They would say: Fresh green! Long life! Give me a coin. or, Fresh, green, fair, and fine, Gingerbread and brandy-wine! I don’t know. Go ahead if you want.

Take this as a day to honor the children in your life. Grandchildren. Your own children. Text them. Call them. Let them know, again, what they meant to you. In the wonder and strangeness of growing up, both us and them, we can forget to acknowledge each other as individuals, as amazements. Let this day encourage you to do it now.

Another facet. Childhood. Consider your children’s, your grandchildren’s lives when they were young. What was it about them then that made them special? That either prefigured traits they have today or that disappeared in the process of becoming older. Pleasant or precious memories. Hopes you had for them.

Seeing Joe in Colorado Springs

I remember Joseph at t-ball. Hitting the ball off the t and then the scrum of kids from all positions heading toward the ball. Many, many trips to baseball card shows. The rookie card of Kirby Puckett he bought when we took the train the wrong way out of St. Louis and had to wait for the next one. Driving with him into St. Paul from Andover. Picking him up from the plane. How he made and kept friends.

Another facet. Consider your own childhood. Honor the child you. What made you special? Pleasant or precious memories.

The garden spider mom and I watched for a whole summer. She had spun her web on the window frame just above our kitchen table. My stack of comic books I kept under my bed with some Superman comics hidden among them. (forbidden) Listening to the 500 mile race in the family car, rain pounding down. All those kids on my block. Games. The coal chute in the basement of our apartment. And the augur which fed the furnace. A dragon, I thought.

Childhood. And, the folks who care for children, too. Like pediatricians. Teachers. Nannys. Their friends.

At Domo
Aging, Family, Health, Holidays, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Truth

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Winter and the Moon of the New Year (and, Christmas Eve)

Thursday gratefuls: Alan. CBE. Jamie. Marilyn. Tara. Kate. Rigel’s clean bowl this morning. Christmas Eve. Our best present only 27 days away! Nordic Advent Calendar. Santa Claus. Magic and wonder. Young children. Another big present only 7 days away. 2021.

 

Kate’s had a long Sjogren’s flare. Started on Monday or so. Low grade temp. Fatigue. Little nausea, which is good. Drains away energy, leaves the slows. Unusual for it to last this long, often gone in a day.

We had a tough, sad, necessary talk on Tuesday. It came after a scam call about our Amazon account, after Rigel’s refusal to eat, after Kep threw up, after Option Care failed again to deliver the bags Kate uses for her tube feedings.

Pierced my calm. Frustration leaked out. Not angry. Momentarily overwhelmed. Got us to talking about this new normal. What we can reasonably expect of each other.

The tough and sad part. I’m not getting better.  It’s taken me months to accept that, to accept this. She put her hand up, indicated a long, slow decline.

I know. I just… I know, too. Wu wei. We flow with this. But, it makes me sad.

Me, too. I used to wonder which of us would die first. Now, I know.

Maybe not. Heart attack. Stroke. Car accident.

Maybe not. But, probably.

There it was. On the table. The dining room table, where, I imagine, most of these conversations happen. Laying things out, saying what’s been unsaid. Right where the plates and the knives and spoons and forks go.

Acceptance, though. Has its own power. Increases intimacy. Clears the haze away. No one is dead. No one is dying quickly. And, we’re all dying anyhow, every day closer.

OK. Not a cheery Christmas message. Maybe not. But the divine with us came out and walked the room while we talked. Reminded us of evanescence. Of the joy of being together. Of the time we have, rather than the time we don’t have.

Brought us together, appreciating each other even more. A gift of a long ancientrail, marriage and love and steadfastness.

It came upon a midnight clear, that glorious night of old.

Garden, Great Wheel, Holidays, Humanities, Myth and Story, Plants, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Green

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Winter and the Moon of the (highly anticipated) New Year

Tuesday gratefuls: The great conjunction of Jupiter-Saturn. Bertilak de Hautdesert. Gawain. Morgan Le Fay.  Arthur. The Celts. Germans. Swiss. English. Irish. Joseph’s new job. Hawai’i. Maps. Friends.

 

 

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight summary.* This long poem is part of the Arthurian tales, perhaps the best known outside of Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur.

The Green Knight is the most important figure in the poem for our Solstice purposes. Sir Gawain takes on the heavy burden of showing the contradictions between courtly love and chivalry. His role is less significant for Solstice thoughts.

Here a few lines from the poem itself.

“Great wonder of the knight
Folk had in hall, I ween,
   Full fierce he was to sight,
And over all bright green.
the hair of the horse’s head was of green, and his fair, flowing locks clung about his shoulders; and a great beard like a bush hung over his breast, and with his noble hair was cut evenly all round above his elbows, and the lower part of his sleeves was fastened like a king’s mantle. The horse’s mane was crisped and gemmed with many a knot, and folded in with gold thread about the fair green with ever a fillet of hair and one of gold, and his tail and head were intertwisted with gold in the same manner, and bound with a band of bright green, and decked with costly stones and tied with a tight knot above; and about them were ringing many full bright bells of burnished gold. Such a horse or his rider were never seen in that hall before…” wayback machine

He and the horse he rode in on. Green. Green. Green.

At Camelot the great New Year’s feast only awaits the exchanging of gifts to begin. The knights of the round table, Arthur, and Guinevere sit at long trencher tables, chatting and drinking. Their anticipation fades when a commotion erupts. A knight on horseback has ridden into the hall on his horse.

Arthur, not wanting Camelot to look cowardly, agrees to the Green Knight’s challenge after silence in the hall. Cut off his head tonight. In a year and a day find him and offer your neck in return.

Sir Gawain, not wanting Arthur to put his kingship at stake, takes his place. Off comes the Green Knight’s head. It rolls toward the head table and after a bit of searching the green, headless body finds it, and jumps gracefully back on his saddle.

On New Year’s day a year hence Gawain, after a long search starting on All Saint’s Day, finds the Green Chapel. I am known as the Green Chapel Knight, he told Gawain.

The Green Chapel though is no church building. It’s a green mound with openings, like a burial mound. The Green Knight appears.

After three swings, two missed, and one knick on the neck, the Green Knight declares Gawain’s pledge satisfied.

I see two related, but different, relationships to the Winter Solstice in this story. The first, perhaps obvious, perhaps not, concerns the turning of the Great Wheel.

The Green Knight comes to the festive hall on New Year’s eve, not long after the Solstice. The world is still cold. The sun low. Plant life browned and enervated. Chopping off the head of the Green Knight corresponds to the harvest. Even after losing his head, his body, his roots, can find it. He lives yet. Just as plants whose bowed stalks and brown leaves live on underground, ready with stored food for the coming of spring.

All the eating, even the feasting, of the fallow time cannot kill the vegetative life represented by the Green Knight. On the Solstice we stay in the depths, in the darkness, but we also know that on the coming night the light will begin to overtake it. Slowly. Gradually. Until all the Green Heads previously fallen pick themselves up again.

The second correspondence concerns Morgan Le Fay, the withered woman contrasted to the fresh young wife of Bertilak de Hautdesert. A witch and half brother of Arthur, it is Morgan Le Fay who turns Bertilak de Hautdesert into the Green Knight.

Magic. Earth Magic. The green covered burial mound is a chapel. The place of Morgan Le Fay, and the Green Knight may represent the older, nature focused magic, a magic that honored the chaotic reality of the natural world. A magic that confronts the civilized world of revels and knights and governments and agriculture. The organized world. Which can only understand death as finality, not as part of an ongoing cycle.

Christianity adopted a linear view of time. You can see it in a world ending second coming somewhere in the distant future. You can see it in the ominous nature of death. A time of testing, of being sorted, wheat from chaff. Fearing death makes sense if eternal judgment awaits.

Earth magic and the vegetative power of renewal that the Green Knight displays remains in the cyclical world of the Great Wheel. Death. Then, life. Life. Then, death. Decomposition and decay as a good, a way of transforming death into a process, a part of the ongoingness of the Great Wheel.

In both of these interpretations a more ancient, wilder world stands against human conceit. Buildings. Honor. Kings. Not necessarily to displace them, but rather to disrupt them. To remind them of the context of their lives.

Whatever layers we create that push away from the natural world: skyscrapers, airplanes, medicine, family and corporate farms, highways and cars, the natural world is always foundational. Inescapable. The necessary in a contingent world.

Maybe this New Year’s, at a feast near you, a Green Knight will ride in on his Green Horse asking you to cut off his head. What will you do?

 

 

 

 

*The Green Knight came into Arthur’s hall and asked any one of his knights to trade blows.

Sir Gawain accepted this challenge and he was allowed to strike first. He cut off the Green Knight’s head. The latter calmly picked it up and told Gawain to meet him on New Year’s Morning for his turn.

On his way to this meeting, Gawain lodged with a lord and each agreed to give the other what he had obtained during each day of Gawain’s stay. On the first day, when the lord was out hunting, Gawain received a kiss from his wife which was duly passed on. On the second day, he received a brace of kisses which were also passed on. On the third day he was given three kisses and some green lace which would magically protect him, but only the three kisses were passed on.

Having left the lord’s residence, Gawain arrived at the Green Chapel where he was to meet the Green Knight. He knelt for the blow. The Green Knight aimed three blows at Gawain, but the first two did not make contact and the third but lightly cut his neck.

The Green Knight turned out to be the lord with whom he had been staying and he said he would not have cut Gawain at all had the latter told him about the lace. The Green Knight was called Bertilak and he lived at Castle Hutton.

Beyond the Boundaries, Commentary on Religion, Coronavirus, Great Wheel, Holidays, Myth and Story, Original Relation, Plants, Science, World History

New Grange. Stonehenge.  Chaco Canyon. Goseck Circle. (Germany) Tulum.

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Winter and the Moon of the New Year (and the great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn)

Monday gratefuls: The Winter Solstice. 30 days. Cottagepie from Easy Entrees. Family. Friends. Lights. Jacquie Lawson’s Nordic Advent Calendar. Magic. In an old guy’s heart. Songs. Gifts. The wonder of children.

 

 

Ah. Can you sink into the darkness? Feel its fecund cape wrap round your shoulders? Comforting. Nourishing. Deep. Deep as the depths of your soul. Deep as the depths of time, even beyond time, to the Hawking period before the universe began to expand. Deep as the love you feel for those close to you. Deep as the bounty of mother earth is abundant.

The longest night. It comes to you. The sun low in the sky, the day shortened. Cold weather, perhaps. Early on in humanity’s adventure with the stars they knew. The sun had begun to flee. Even at the height of the growing season, on the summer solstice, the nights had begun to increase in length.

This gradual, oh so gradual, slipping away of the light. Would it continue until the night became all there was? How would the crops grow? The animals get fed? The people stay warm and fed?

But, yes, I imagine they also knew. Last year, too. And the sun returned. And the year before that. Let’s see if we can find the moment, capture the day. That way we can assure each other that the sun will not stay away. Let’s build monuments in stone and wood that capture the light of that day, or the position of the stars on that night.

New Grange. Stonehenge.  Chaco Canyon. Goseck Circle. (Germany) Tulum.

This suggests to me that far from being frightened on this night of nights, the ancients anticipated it, probably looked forward to it. But, they also wanted to be sure it would happen again and again, so they spent vast resources ensuring they would know its arrival.

Can you imagine the celebratory feelings when, just as the stone alignments had predicted in the past, the sun came again through the slot, lined up with the stones? The shaman was right! We would get another growing season. See! Life could go on. Ancient science comforting the masses, just as contemporary science comforts us now with vaccines.

Never in my lifetime have we needed the message of the winter solstice more than this year, this 2020 of cursed memory. As the virus claims more lives, infects more people, remains dangerous especially in the richest nation on earth, we need a sign. Tonight is that sign.

Darkness need not lead to despair. These depths, this night, this virus, are not static. Just as fecund darkness enriches all plant life in the fallow season, so does the light of creation shine each year to enrich the plants in the green time. We know that because tonight teaches about darkness and its twin, the Summer Solstice, teaches us about light. Both necessary. Like the symbol of the Tao.

Rising right now, in the Covid darkness, vaccines have begun to dispel the fear and show us that yes, this pandemic can and will end. We are victims neither of darkness nor the glare of a sun that will not set. The earth teaches us this lesson every year. The Great Wheel turns and so do all the vagaries of life.

Great Wheel, Holidays, Humanities, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Wintertide is Coming

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Wintertide  December 21 to February 1

Conifer. Evergreen. Pine. Get it? We live in Conifer, often shop in Evergreen, and I pass through Pine once a month on my way to the Happy Camper in Bailey. Though a bit on the nose, if you visited our mountain towns, you would see how these small communities got their names. Lodgepoles. Ponderosa. Spruce. Dominant here. Greening mountain sides. Out my loft/studio window Black Mountain rises up to 10,000 feet, almost a thousand above our home on the peak of Shadow Mountain. The shadows make it appear Black right now, but in other times of day it is green with the Lodgepoles that cover it. Our backyard. Lodgepole.

This is their season. When they stand green while the Aspen and the Willow and the Ash put away their leaves for the winter. Now, as far back in human history, these trees seem to carry on through the cold and Snow of Winter, ever living, their needles green.

Think of it. The Sun sank lower and lower, the nights grew longer, the air colder. The Maple and the Oak and the Elm and the Willow and the Ironwood all lost their leaves, seemed to shrink into themselves. The gardens had only dead stalks of Beans, Tomatoes, Cabbage. They would stick out, above the first winter Snow, sad and fallen. Dead. The Grasses were brown, bowing to the coming of the Winter King. Nothing that bore food lived. Or, so it seemed.

Except. Conifer. Evergreen. Pine. Maybe a Douglas Fir, a soaring Redwood, a Sequoia. A Jackpine. Still green. Yes. These cold fallow days were not all powerful. Even though the sun had begun to disappear, these trees braved the elements. Still green.

Since Summer’s End, Samain, the time of the last harvest, until Imbolc, February 1st, celebrating the coming of the Ewe’s Milk, there would be no new nourishment from the land, from the world of plants. Even the game in the woods grew thin, suffering the death of the green things as humans did. Fish required chopping through thick ice. Standing in the cold.

Bring in the tree. Bring in the Pine, the Conifer, the Evergreen. Bring them into the house to celebrate the hope, the wish for a new growing season. We need them in the house before the Winter Solstice, when the night and the dark have their victory, light vanquished for as long as it will be all year. Maybe we put stars on them as a Martin Luther tale suggests he did after a Christmas season walk. Or, maybe tree lights remind us of Adam, the first human, who put flaming sticks in the ground for 8 days starting on the Solstice. By the 8th day he trusted the sun would return.

And, bring in a log. A thick one. One that can burn a while. A Yule log. We’ll put it in the fireplace, light it, then put it out each night. At the end of the season we’ll save enough of it to start the fire for the Yule log next Wintertide.

Go outside. Bring in the slash from tree cutting. A few thicker logs. A bonfire! Crackling, sending sparks in the air, up toward the heavens. (not here right now though. wildfires.) Fire. Evergreens. In the fallow time.

Those Romans. Hey, they were something, weren’t they? Saturnalia. Celebrated Jupiter’s overthrow of his father, Saturn. A new world order. It ran from December 17th to December 24th. A lot of decorating,gift giving, feasting, singing songs, giving each other candles to celebrate the eternal light. No Rudolf or Reindeer. Later on.

Lots of other links to these holidays. If you’re interested, find a copy of The Winter Solstice: the Sacred Traditions of Christmas, by John Matthews. Also, good suggestions for celebration.

This winter. This particular winter. Wintertide 2020/2021. So much struggle and pain. So many broken promises. So many damaged homes and souls. And, worsening. Right now. As Wintertide comes into its own. Cases in the quarter million or so a day. Deaths over 370,000. Trump still swinging the wrecking ball. Proud Boys in the streets of D.C. Climate change reappearing. Demands to heal centuries of injustice still heating up the body politic. A divided nation. Oh, my.

So what’s Wintertide all about? Those evergreen Trees that live in the cold and fallow months. Conifer, Pine, Evergreen. The Yule log that burns this year and the next. The long journey into darkness finally comes to a climax. The children of wonder whose births have come to be celebrated now: Attis, Mithras, Baal, Tammuz, Apollo and Dionysus, Jesus. All those architectural monuments to the Winter Solstice: Chichen Itza, New Grange, Stone Henge.

each birth, always

They congregate now, in the fallow time, as human markers of lived hope. Look, the Evergreens can survive! Here’s the piece of the Yule log from last year. Last year! This will end.

Happy birthday baby gods. Reminding us that the true power lives in each of us humans. The sun coming through great hall of New Grange to light up the spirals for seventeen minutes. Kulkukan, the feathered serpent, visible on the steps to the top of the temple at Chichen Itza. We’ve been here before. And made it through.

Trump will leave. We’ll gather round to work on our nation together. The vaccines will arrive and Covid will get pushed back into the ranks of a seasonal flu at most. You and I will see each other. Give those hugs and kisses and handshakes and wiggles that have waited through this benighted year. That’s what Wintertide is all about.

So bring in the mistletoe. Hang some green boughs. Light some candles. Make some glog. Sing songs. Read poetry. We’ll be ok.

Commentary on Religion, Commentary on the news, Coronavirus, Family, Feelings, Friends, Great Wheel, Great Work, Health, Holidays, News of the Strange, Politics, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, US History

Oh. We live in interesting times.

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Samain and the Moon of the New Year (and the great conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter)

Saturday gratefuls: 32 days. 32! Nearly finished with the cds. A snowy, snow globe day. Rigel and Kep, our bed warmers. Kate. A wise woman. Smart, too. Vaccines. Coming to an arm near you. Soon. That light in the tunnel went up a bit in brightness. The star over Bethlehem explained? The Winter Solstice. Soon. Staycation.

 

Complex feelings. Friend Tom Crane talked a couple of days ago about the feelings that come up when considering climate change. Made me think about all of us right now. I’ve been labile this week, up and down. Unusual for me. If I get melancholy, I stay there a while. Up and bright? Ditto. But. Covid. Trump. Kate’s long illness. Climate change plus the long road ahead for our nation. Isolation from friends and loved ones.

Bet I’m not the only one experiencing complex emotions. Up. Vaccines. Down. 377,000 deaths. 250,000 + new cases a day. Up. 32 days! Down. Still 32 days left. Up. Renewable energy. Back into the Paris Accords. Down. Baked in heat. Record carbon emissions this year. Up. Jon and Ruth and Gabe on Google Meet. Down. Having to see them on Google Meet. Up. Many good days in a row for Kate. Down. Sudden fatigue yesterday. Up. Good days mean no nausea, no fatigue beyond the usual. Down. Stamina poor.

And these are the big drivers. Every day has mood changes. That unexpected money from the oil well! That crabby e-mail from a relative. Work or relationship stress. Kids. Dogs. Weather. Feelings of self-worth or self-worthlessness. Whatever triggers you. And we all have triggers.

Point. A complex web of stressors has us all dangling in our silken cocoons and each shake of the web warns us that the spider might be coming for her next meal. This is not normal. Where do we go? Out to eat? To a movie? Have friends over? A sabbath service? Take a vacation? Not for most of us. What’s the right metaphor? See-saw. Spider web. Thin ice with cracks. Fingernails on chalkboards. Whatever it is, this is a fraught time. An interesting time.

I’m giving myself permission to feel these movements, up and down, and to react to them. To not be hard on myself for not maintaining an up feeling in down times. Perhaps you need this permission, too.

Commentary on the news, Coronavirus, Family, Holidays, Music, Politics, Shadow Mountain, US History

Music

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Samain and the Moon of the New Year (with the great conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter)

Friday gratefuls: 1:00 am this morning. Time to think about things. Mark and Riyadh. The Winter Solstice. The Green Knight. The evergreen Trees with lights. That big log that burns this year and next. Presents. Holiday cheer. Diane and her Easy Entrees gift. Yum. CD’s. Music. Especially Chamber Music. And, jazz. And, Janis Joplin. Vaccines. 33 days. His moving van. His moving carcass. Climate Change. Covid. And all of its many blessings.

 

A few years ago, copying Charlie Haislet, I bought a cd carousel. We put as many in it of ours that would fit. It took a long time and we created an elaborate system for knowing where each cd was in the system. Never used it. Moved it out here. It’s big and clunky. Why did I do that, I wondered? We decided to take them out, replace them in their clamshells. Underway, maybe fifty percent done. As we’ve sorted them, I’ve begun to yearn for more music in my life. Again.

Kate and I met at the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, as you probably know. I went for seventeen years, Kate even longer. When we moved to Andover, driving in became less and less attractive. We would want to go. Mean to go. And sit at home anyhow. I love Mozart, Haydn, Faure, Chopin, Ives, Barber. I love hearing them live. Chamber music, after all. Without the big, to me often overwhelming sound, of a full orchestra. So many memorable evenings at the Ordway in Rice Park. In particular, of course, the one where I finally found the courage to ask Kate out for coffee.

Next. Figuring out a way to connect cd player to the inhouse speakers. Folks before had an elaborate sound system, but we’ve never made it work. Chicken soup? I can do. Wiring? Oy vey. I’m gonna give it the old college try, then hire geek squad or somebody like them if I can’t get it.

It has given Kate and me something to do together twice. putting them in and taking them out. Oh, well. Best laid plans…

Awake last night. Spent a few minutes wondering why I eat so much red meat. Result: I like it. An addictive personality I guess, but I can’t quit. Moved on as anyone pondering matters at 1 am is wont to do. Imaging the ending of Jennie’s Dead. The twilight of the gods. A deomachy. Want to write it. Covid. Vaccines.

Glad for Covid. Got trump on his way. Making us consider our nation and democracy at their core levels of meaning. Sad about the deaths, the isolation from friends and family. Yes. But nothing is only one thing.

Very glad Biden picked Deb Haaland to run the Interior Department. A Native American in charge of the Cabinet department most implicated in crimes against them. Should make for a very interesting four years. “ … I’ll be fierce for all of us, our planet, and all of our protected land.” WP And Michael Reagan as head of the EPA. Brenda Mallory will head the White Office of Environmental Quality. Both Black. The Sierra Club has had environmental justice at the forefront of its work for years because communities of color are disproportionately affected by dirty water, polluted air, and toxic waste. So, bout time.

Now we have to win those two Senate races in Georgia. If I were younger and Kate healthier, I’d go to Georgia to work on the campaigns. So, so important.

What a fucking year.

Commentary on the news, Coronavirus, Great Work, Health, Minnesota, Politics, US History, Weather +Climate, World History

Debates. From first principles.

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Samain and the Moon of the New Year (2021!)

Tuesday gratefuls: VRCC. Doggy care at a high level. Dr. Timian, Rigel’s doc when she was hospitalized. Rigel. Amber. And, Amber’s special bandages. Ruby and her heated seats. A now gone, happily, feeling of illness. Diane, from her sanctuary in San Francisco. The hermitage here on Shadow Mountain. Fresh Snow. A plowed driveway. Feelings, low, lower. Comfort in the loft. Games Kate and Charlie play. A raw version of life, hard and relentless. A joyful version: committed, cheerful, resilient. Fluctuating between them. 36 days.

 

When conservative columnists like George Will and Michael Gerson write provocative columns skewering Republicans and fellow conservatives (see this by Gerson, The moral hypocrisy of conservative leaders is stunning, as an example) and a politician like George Romney condemns the administration, next year’s trajectory becomes clearer. At its optimum liberals, radicals (I don’t like progressive. It hides.), and conservatives will all examine themselves beginning with first principles.

The conservatives, right now anyhow, seem to have the most honest dialogue started. May it continue. Liberals will have to admit that their “desire to govern” will gut meaningful change in at least three important areas: racial justice, radical police reform, and addressing economic inequities. Radicals will have to admit that their insistence in all or nothing too often, usually, results in nothing.

Of course, Covid must get our full attention until it abates, but that shouldn’t stop us from going into our respective camps and chewing the fat over a miserable four years of the American Experience. What about liberal leadership, policies, general stances, left the door open for a Trump? What needs refocusing? Especially following a decidedly liberal, world hailed Presidency, like Barack Obama’s.

I have three areas where liberalism has failed. The lackluster and Republican conceived medical system fix, Obamacare, or the ACA, did not fix or even mend a broken system. Yes, it delivered health insurance to some folks who needed it, but that’s a very low bar when you consider the mess of the public/private chaos we insist on calling a system. If you’ve had any frequent dealings with it, you’ll know the financial, bureaucratic, and logical hurdles required to get care. Not smart enough to know if Medicare for All is the solution, but I know that whatever we do must look more like a National Health Service than a cafeteria of options whose costs and efficacy we can’t determine.

How do we keep the public safe? The whole public, not just middle and upper middle class white neighborhoods. (The upper classes build walls and hire their own private security.) This is a debate that must be radical in its starting point. Bracket police. What do complex urban societies need to investigate and prosecute crime? To stop criminal activity while it’s happening? To attend well to mental health crises and in-home medical emergencies? To keep buildings safe from fire? To manage traffic, large events, disasters? Let’s put all solutions on the table from crazy dreamy to harsh and pragmatic ones. We need to rethink community safety and how to achieve it.

Economic inequities. A Green New Deal? OK, by me. Job retraining. Earned income tax credits? Guaranteed annual income? Reparations. A truly progressive tax code. Tax the wealthy at a level closer to the 1950’s and 1960’s. Put in place a reasonable inheritance tax to ensure against aristocratic pretensions. Rethink the value of work and workers. Shore up the union movement. Give employers incentive to hire under and inexperienced workers. Perhaps their first year or half year of salary could be subsidized.

We must have these debates. Conservatives, liberals, and radicals must gather among themselves and debate them. There must be a public dialogue. I use the word must. Why? Because these are core issues which speak to the safety and security of all Americans.

Are there other important issues? Oh, yes. Climate change. Foreign policy. Infrastructure development. To name three. And, yes, debates about these must go forward, and quickly, too.

There is much democratic work to be done. And much tin-pot dictator work to be undone. I see Trump’s time in office as a cry for help from a country in which certain bedrock matters like health, safety, and work have all been damaged by years of neglect and false promises. Let’s pay attention. Let’s insure neglect and false promises are not part of agenda. Beginning now.