Lughnasa and the Cheshbon Nefesh Moon

Wednesday gratefuls: Shadow of the morning darkness. Nerve ablations scheduled. Artemis. Mythic Quest. Apple TV. Tenderloin, sweet Corn, sliced Peppers. Lunch. All labor. Robots. A.I. The cloud. Desktop and laptop and handheld computers. Nividia. AMD. Intel. Spending on AI data centers. The environmental cost of AI. Life. Death. Mystery.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Tzelem elohim. All made of the same stuff.

Year Kavannah: Wu Wei

Week Kavannah: Ometz Lev. Strength of the heart. The inner courage to move forward. Courage.

Tarot:  #4, The Lord (Druid Craft Deck)

• Stability and structure: Creating a solid, secure foundation for a project, family, or business. This card suggests a time to build and organize.

One brief shining: The inner world, a place of dreams and memories, emotions and intuition, Progoff’s inner cathedral, Jung’s shadow and the collective unconscious, the nefesh and the ruach and the neshama, where the outer world of materiality has no foothold, blends and develops our experience with our gifts, creating an I am.

Labor day: A bit late, but hey, I’m retired.

From my 50’s Indiana childhood I imprinted a steadfast rule. School starts the day after Labor Day and ends the day before Memorial Day. Anything else violates my understanding of a proper childhood. Colorado schools, for example, start in mid-August and end in mid to late May. Beep! Wrong. No kid should have to go back to school before the State Fair is done. I’m just sayin’.

Labor day returns our focus, however briefly, to labor unions, the working class, blue collar folks. The citizens of Alexandria, Indiana. My home town. Workers who made batteries and alternators at Delco Remy. Workers who made headlights and taillights for Guide Lamp. Who worked one of the three shifts: days, evening, nights. Yes, in that time General Motors required enough batteries and headlights to require factories that ran twenty-four hours a day.

No longer. What is the future of this kind of labor? Bleak. Even with red tie guy’s tariffs. The return of manufacturing to US soil? Unlikely in any substantial way. Global trade will not go away and the benefit (?) of cheaper labor will always land somewhere around the globe.

Then, of course. A.I. What will it do to the labor force? It may extend the leveled sites of Delco and Guide to paralegals,  lawyers, doctor’s offices, newsrooms, and classrooms. So called knowledge workers. No one really knows.

But, disruption for workers of all sorts has been the norm in the not free for all of capitalist economies. Whatever AI and robotics can do will shuffle the deck of work, of that I have no doubt. But how much? Hard to predict.

Work, if you recall your Bereshit, Genesis, is a curse laid on Adam and Eve for eating of the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A curse. We pretend it’s ennobling because we need to. We have to justify our need to leave a warm bed, a lover or spouse, the kids and the dog to, what, win bread? Move up, gain status? Do something worthwhile? Yes. A curse on all our houses.