Beltane Emergence Moon
Planning on an hour or so a day, maybe two some days. Today the garage. Clustering yet another batch of toxic chemicals for a run to the hazardous waste depot. Old motor oil, gasoline preservative, brake fluid, paint. I put in that pile the ambitious collection of items I got when I decided to tackle small engine repair.
In my usual avidity I dove into it, buying manuals, tools and imagining the things I could fix: snowblower, lawn tractor, weed whacker, chainsaw. Why? I can’t recall now, but, like the irrigation system I reasoned, it can’t be that hard. Oh. Yes. It could. Wrenches and screwdrivers danced out of my hands. Things weren’t where they were supposed to be, or at least where I figured they should be. Turning screws, cranking off recalcitrant nuts, slipping belts off and on and connecting metal latches all had unanticipated problems for me. I’m sure they were the kind of thing a kid learns with a father or brother who enjoys these things, but I skipped that part of my education.
Finally I admitted what could have been obvious to me in the beginning. This required more patience than I had and more skill than I was willing to learn. I felt a bit defeated, somewhat ashamed of myself as a man, not being able to get simple mechanical tasks done.
This sequence of imagining myself into some new skill began with lock smith ads in the Popular Mechanics and True magazines I read as a child. Boy, if I knew how to pick locks, make keys, install safes, I’d have a real, useful craft. Over time this theme of having a real, useful craft would, oddly, lead me to attend seminary and learn how to be a minister. Ministry was not, however, equivalent to being a locksmith. It was both more and less complicated, more and less useful.