Yule and the Moon of New Beginnings
Boxing day gratefuls: Shadow, my sweet girl. Feeling no pain. Global warming. Climate change. Chatgpt. Snow in the forecast. Sorta. Football. How bout those Broncos? And, those Vikings. Joe. Seoah. Murdoch. Ruth and Gabe at Christmas dinner with Jon’s friends. Gabe looking through his dad’s art. Joanne and Alan today at the Hummingbird. Garlic in winter. Yule. Shema. Chesed. Yirah.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: Resistance work
Life Kavannah: Wu Wei Shadow, my Wu Wei mistress
Week Kavannah: Yirah. Radical amazement, awe.
Becoming a metaPhysician
One brief shining: On Christmas day I heard the heralds sing, Vikings in yet another takeaway from the Lions, that Viking’s running back leaped and got the ball over the pylon, touchdown, Bo Nix scrambles for another first down, and Bronco’s keep the ball moving downfield, proving that Christmas day did send good cheer to me, and to all Viking’s and Bronco’s fans, a happy New Year!
Riders on the storm. Into this world we’re thrown. Jim Morrison, who died too young, knew his Heidegger. Thrownness is a Heideggerian idea that seems obvious once you understand it, yet has profound implications for understanding anyone’s life purpose.
Thrownness means birth locates you not only in a family and a place, significant enough, but also in an era, a moment in time neither in the past nor in the future, but in what becomes for you, as long as you live, your time. Sorta obvious, right?
Its profundity comes from this: Even though I may want very much to be a Druid in the peak era of Celtic civilization, I can’t. The past. Even though I may want to live in an era without Trump, I can’t. We share this time. Damn it. Even though I may want to live in a time long after this one. I can’t. The future.
Thrownness positions us where we are, with this body and its gifts, its flaws, these relatives and friends with their gifts and flaws. With the joys and possibilities available through computers, electric cars, zoom calls, good medicine, a prosperous nation. But also within a time straining to solve civilizational problems through old, time cursed solutions like oligarchy, fascism, and bigotry.
We cannot be anywhere else, with any other world around us. We must, therefore, act within this one. And, we must act as the person we are, not one we wish we might magically become.
In case this is all too abstruse, and it probably is, let me anchor the idea in my life. I was thrown into post-WW II America with two veterans of that war as parents. It was a time when polio still raged among the young. It caught up with me. I grew up in a small Indiana town with displaced hillbillie’s kids as my classmates and friends. My mother died when I was 17, almost out of high school.
Let’s stop there. I had no choice about any of these things. They were the realities of my life in the same way being raised as a Masai warrior’s child of the same era was theirs. My development physically, emotionally, intellectually, had to have these influences.
In other words who I am today at 78, sitting on Shadow Mountain, remains anchored in how I chose to respond to those realities. Could not have been otherwise. Though my choices could have, potentially, been different, they were the ones I made and I cannot go back and remake them.
As this 21st century year comes to a close, give some thought to the world into which you were thrown. It is your only world, for this lifetime, and only you can offer yourself to it as healer, servant, bringer of justice and compassion, artist or engineer.
