Mabon and the Sukkot Moon
Sunday gratefuls: Sukkot starting Wednesday. Dr. Buphati, medical oncologist, tomorrow. Variety Firewood. Yom Kippur. Mabon. Poetry. Cold Mountain. Basho. Rumi. Ginny and Janice. AI. Orange one and Kamala. Election 2024. Please vote. Mail-in Ballots. Civilized. Got mine yesterday. Climate change. The Gulf Stream. Greenland Ice sheet. The Atlantic. Milton and Helene.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: Golden Aspen
Kavannah: Patience
One brief shining: Bought a chair a while back, made by the Amish in the Arts and Crafts style, a Morris Chair, and a Violet themed stained glass standing lamp to go behind it, then a standing globe so I could find my dispersed family and better understand geopolitics, a set of timed lights to ramp up my balance exercising, not to mention the Aeneid, Mysticism, The Vegetarian books, and started to get a queasy feeling that I’m buying too much, some of the boxes yet unopened, though my finances are solid, not sure, maybe being good to myself feels (is) selfish? The Calvinist in me says yes, the Jew in me says no. Not as long as you care for and are generous with others. Which I feel I am. No wonder I converted.
Tough, fighting those strains of self-abnegation developed through years of scarcity and violently enforced religious beliefs. Violent, you say? Yes. Consider. If, in the course of your life, you vary from the path of salvation, miss the mark too often, what say ye about the next life? Hell and damnation. Even if you’ve convinced yourself long ago that the three-story universe was false, the fact that such a consequence was ever considered possible for sinning too much? Too often? Badly enough? makes sin a devastating burden on the psyche. Sort of a Milton plus a Helene plus a Katrina for the soul. Seems like a system designed to keep me in line with threats, and not insubstantial threats, but of damage to the very self of Self.
No. What matters is how you act today, in this moment. No karmic overburden. A similar system, btw. Yesterday, that old life, has slipped into the stream of time’s flux. What can you do with it? Nothing. But today? This life. This October 13th, 2024 life? This one we can work with.
Patience. I’ve realized that impatience exposes the anxieties I still have. Hangovers from those early days in Alexandria and the First Methodist Church. No, neither my family nor Methodism were blatantly abusive. No, they merely encouraged an anti-self work ethic, an other-focused diminishment of self, a closed mouth attitude toward sexuality making it confusing and embarrassing, an inner compass always slightly off because there were too many wrong paths, wrong actions, wrong feelings to follow a clear direction.
All of this, an uncertainty about personal worth, about the eventual destination of one’s soul, a valorization of work and self-denial, of hiding true feelings were the hallmarks of a good upbringing in mid-century, small-town America. I got a solid dose of it. Did you?
