Lughnasa College Moon
We’re gathering little clutches of cash together for moving related expenses. We cashed out some non-performing CD’s, have sold various items we didn’t want to move and just sold Kate’s silver from her first marriage plus some assorted gold pieces.
There are a lot of sunk costs in this process. The maintenance we’re having done outside, whatever inside work needs to be done, working with SortTossPack (which generates revenue, too) and then the move itself. There will be, too, various packing costs like crates for our big paintings, special boxes for the tv’s and other electronics. All come out of our pocket before we sell the house (if we buy in Colorado before we sell).
None of this is a surprise, all components of any move that involves selling and buying real property. We do these dances with material things, dances that mimic George Carlin’s famous skit. Yes, I suppose we could shrug off the house, the furniture, the books, the art, the quilting machinery, the pots and pans, the garden implements. I suppose we could.
But we will not. Because the world reels us in with the hand of a grandchild, the bark of a dog, the growth of a garlic bulb, we will not. Our life, our path, is not that of the ascetic, though the ascetic teaches us not to confuse our things with our lives. Our life, our path, is not that of the hedonist, though the hedonist teaches us to love certain things which give us pleasure. Our life is a thread, a small part of the larger tapestry being woven of our time.
We’ll add our thread, tied already to those of children and grand-children, land and plants, the lives of dogs and friends. The weft shuttles us across the warp threads laid down by the physical and larger political changes. Our presence is subtle, as is that of any particular thread in a tapestry, but consider, without each thread the tapestry will not emerge. There will be only warp threads sagging with nothing to hold them together.
We matter-and so do you-even though we are, each of us, only tiny instances in the even larger tapestry being woven now by our galaxy, our cluster, our super-cluster and that one part of another so vast we cannot comprehend it. This is what the Greeks knew when they composed their great masterpieces. Fate is not a hand from the future that plucks your thread toward a necessary spot; rather, fate is the story of stories already told, visible only after the thread is in the tapestry.
