Lughnasa and the Cheshbon Nefesh Moon

Wednesday gratefuls: Tom. Rascal. Paul. Findlay. Morning darkness. Cold morning. 36. Hail protection on Artemis. Shadow and her new puzzle. Her morning kisses. Maddie, coming today. Carol yesterday. The Sloan-Kettering trial. The killed comforter. Lashon hara. Words matter. Nerve ablation next month. P.E.T. scan. The never ending thrills.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Maddie

Year Kavannah: Wu Wei

Week Kavannah: Derech Eretz. The way of the land, the essential human decency that came before Torah.

Tarot: Five of cups, reversed. (Druid Craft)

• Finding opportunity in setbacks: You are starting to see the value in what you have learned from a painful experience.
• Open to help: You may now be more willing to accept help from others.

One brief shining: Learning the lesson of accepting help, hard for this head-down, push forward in spite of guy, leaning on the kindness of friends for rides to procedures, appointments does not come without cost and does not come without reward, a cost in changed self-image, the reward understanding it needed to change.

 

Sport: Ohani. A baseball player for the ages. Our Babe Ruth. This Japanese pitcher, yes, that’s right pitcher, just hit 50 home runs in consecutive seasons. He hit number 50 last night against the Philadelphia Phillies. Whadda guy.

Though I’ve never taken to baseball the way my nerdy, statistics oriented son did, I’ll admit in this year, this particular year, a sport in which violence does not feature, in which all team members contribute, one where fans sing songs during the seventh inning stretch, and a sport, like basketball, home grown and oh so American appeals to my need for something of this country that makes me smile.

Just a moment: The Wrath of the already Wrathful. I fear we’ve entered a new, even darker phase of this already far too long presidency. Retribution. Vengeance. Punishment. We may as well have a dominatrix as our leader, one who sees the rest of us as masochists who delight in pain, grin at affliction.

As my friend Paul observed, protesting may carry a new risk. A president and Justice Department and an FBI without a moral compass. No longer constrained by such delicacies as the Bill of Rights, such niceties as habeas corpus. No longer held in check by the courts. Buttressed at times by the National Guard and the U.S. military.

Concentration camps: “Based on internal agency documents, overall detention capacity is projected to increase significantly. One document from July 2025 reported plans to add 10,312 beds through no-bid contracts alone. This was part of an effort to increase overall capacity to at least 100,000 beds” Gemini on beds for immigrant detainees to be added by building new facilities, opening shuttered prisons, and adding capacity like the tents for up 5,000 at Ft. Bliss (get the irony here?)

Here’s my question. Once the last immigrant has been detained and the last flight for South Sudan or Venezuela or Ghana has left the ground who will fill up those freshly empty beds?

Given the state of play after Charlie Kirk’s assassination? Any who deviate. From the good, the true, and the proper. As defined by angry, bitter people who see mercy and justice as weakness. Lordy, lordy.