Yule and the Moon of New Beginnings
Shabbat gratefuls: Shadow of the morning. Snow at last! Cold. 10 degrees. Winter. Vince. Joe coming this week. Ruth and her wrist. Dean’s list again. Gabe. Starting his last semester of high school. Ginny and Janice. Luke and Leo. Minnesota. Colorado. Blue state resisters. My homes.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: Minnesota
Life Kavannah: Wu Wei Shadow, my Wu Wei mistress
Year Kavannah: Creativity. Yetziratiut. “Inspiration exists, but
it has to find you working.” ― Pablo Picasso
Week Kavannah: Wholeness. Shleimut. “The concept of shleimut extends beyond the individual, applying to relationships (finding a life partner with whom one feels complete) and the community (mending societal cracks to achieve collective creativity and flourishing).”
Tarot: Ten of Bows, responsibility.
- The central meaning of the card is shouldering a significant weight of duties, obligations, or stress, either for yourself or others. Although the burden is heavy, the card also suggests that you are close to the finish line of a major project or life cycle. The end goal is in sight, and persistence is needed to reach it.
One brief shining: Shleimut and the ten of bows resonate with each other since another meaning of shleimut involves tikkun olam, or repair of the world; the joining of these two ideas in these, the years of devastation and degradation of a once great nation, remind us that though the path winds ever upward and our burden can seem unbearable, our journey toward wholeness, restoration demands much of us, perhaps all of us.
Dog journal: Shadow now trots inside as if the threshold, what threshold, dad?, were no longer a vampire-like barrier which she had not been invited to cross. Oh, happy day! Well, most of the time. Sometimes she needs a bit of encouragement. But only very occasionally. Thank you, Natalie, Dr. Josy, prozac, and those pheromones. Oh, and Nathan, too.
Her life and mine. Again, together.
Family: Set up a zoom call with my sister, Mary, in Melbourne, and my brother, Mark, in Hafar, Saudi Arabia. Not many time slots when we’re all awake. To make it work, I agreed to start the call at 9 pm, MST. Well past my bedtime. 3 pm for Mary and 7 am for Mark.
If you draw a triangle using Shadow Mountain, Melbourne, and Hafar as its points, it would almost be an equilateral with 8,000 miles on each side. That’s sibling dispersion. Little bits of Alexandria, Indiana spread apart from Alexandria and each other.
After looking up those distances, I decided to look for Shadow Mountain’s antipode. According to this website, antipodes map, tunneling straight through Mother Earth from here would land me under the waters of the Pacific, somewhere east of the main island of New Zealand. So, I won’t do that cause I’d drown.
Just a moment: So the only limits on red tie guy’s foreign policy is, in his own words during an NYT interview, “My own morality.” Oh, my.
Yeah. This from the guy who’s said he would “accept” the Nobel Peace Prize if Venezuela’s winner of this year’s prize, María Corina Machado, offers it to him. Managing to combine ignorance (of who gives the prize) with narcissism, greed, envy, and lust. I mean, really?