Fall Hunter Moon
Snow. An inch or two falling right now. Wet, heavy. A reminder that the season has changed, is changing. Warm days ahead yet, so the solar snow shovel should take care of this round.
Speaking of seasons, this is not the silly season; it’s the Insane Clown Posse season. When a reactionary like Mike Pence gets kudos for a stable debate performance, the world has gone seriously out of whack. This is a guy who tried to abrogate the first amendment, destroy unions, and denigrates women. The only reason he looked less than totally unappealing is the comparison to his running mate, Donald the Hair Trump. OK, Kaine wasn’t much better, but, hey, these guys were picked as Vice-Presidential candidates for a reason. Whatever it was.
The bathroom is now complete. Yowza.
Yesterday was a reading day, getting up to speed on the middot (character trait) of watchfulness. The notion of Mussar is to take character traits like watchfulness, explicate them, then practice them. Literally. Mussar encourages taking a character trait like watchfulness, then working over the period of a month to manifest it in your life or raise your observance of it to a higher level. Watchfulness entails what a Jesuit might call examen. Paying attention to your behavior, becoming conscious of it rather than letting it flow by out of habit unnoticed, that’s the first part.
The second part is evaluating that behavior as either of an outward oriented nature, yetzer tov, or of a self-ish nature, yetzer hara, inclination. This is a continuous process, a scrutiny that critiques actions. In fact, Mussar encourages this kind of self-examination at a regular time each day, too, partly, I think, to consolidate learning.
Watchfulness does not quite equate to mindfulness thought they’re definitely related ideas. Mindfulness has less of an orientation toward self-knowledge. So the middot for this month is watchfulness.
