Yule and the Moon of New Beginnings
Sunday gratefuls: Wild neighbors. Wilderness. The Wildland/Urban Interface. Going wild. That was wild. Wilding. Into the Woods. Fairy Tales. The Veldt. Hominins. Hominids. Australopithecus. Lucy. Neanderthals. Homo sapiens. Boundary Waters. Pukaskwa. Lake Superior. Isle Royale. Bob Weir.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: The Wild
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: #1, The Shaman This was the result card for my Celtic Cross on New Year’s day. I feel an attunement with him. A sense of life purpose.
One brief shining: The Arapaho National Forest surrounds Shadow Mountain, just across Black Mountain to my southwest lies Staunton State Park, all sorts of Critters live in both of them, their daily comings and goings dictated largely, though not completely, by their wild nature.
Bob Weir died. Jerry Garcia a while ago. Levon. Robbie. Jimmy. Janis. Jim lies in a grave in a famous Paris Cemetery. Hit me today that as a generation ages so do the icons of youth. Bob made it to 78. We know that age, many of us I count as close friends.
As movie stars, novelists, members of the bands, poets, and athletes, spouses and friends begin to drop away, the world can seem paler, less than it was. Yet I find listening to Sugar Magnolia a magic carpet ride. Not back to the Sixties. No, they’re gone. To what then? To the person I am now,
The one whose heart still burns with a need for a just and loving world, whose voice can still sing the protest I feel in my chest when each piece of a world and a country I once knew gets taken apart, shelved or discarded. We don’t go backwards, life moves frontward in a way I don’t understand. Linear, when I want it to be, even believe to be, cyclical.
I wish the New Right understood this. Just because you resurrect gun boat diplomacy, imagine a world of homogeneity, enshrine Gordon Gecko as a prophet in your prosperity cult, and swagger astride the world like a drunken, ignorant colossus, doesn’t mean any of those things are good or true.
Many, perhaps most of us believe in our core that imperialism as policy died out decades ago. We also believe that our nation becomes richer in knowledge, cuisine, innovation when we embrace the other, not shun them. Greed is not good, as Gecko illustrates, it distorts values and priorities in inhuman and inhumane ways. We also know, as fellow passengers on spaceship earth that wild grabs for power: Venezuela, Greenland, the Nobel Peace Prize only delay the day when we learn what all kindergartners know. We need to share.
As I move closer to my last year in my 70’s, I feel confident that we will, in time, prevail. And when we do, we can put a little Hendrix on the headphones, some Janis, Stones, or The Band and remind ourselves of how we came to be the people we are now.