Winter First Moon of the New Year
Spent yesterday shifting to my new work schedule. A couple of hours on Ovid, plus analyzing some of Caesar’s Gallic Wars. Edited three portions of the Tailte Mythos: Book I and began clipping postings from Ancientrails to consult for my first essay in the Reimagining project.
Also learned that I can’t go to sustaining status at the MIA until I’ve had 8 years as a docent. Sustaining would cut my tour requirements in half.
This means I’m going to have duck out of the Sierra Club sooner than I had planned.
No plant starts this year. I’m going to buy already started plants and of those only those we decide to grow for particular, planned uses. We’re going to shift our gardening now toward minimalism, toward those things we’ll preserve. Two colonies of bees. Emphasizing less maintenance everywhere, planting towards a time when the gardens will need even less, eventually very little care.
Life’s focus changes as our lives change and now I’ve become focused on those kind of things only I can do. Only I can write the Tailte books. Only I can set down my scattered thoughts about a sort 0f ur-faith, a common reverence all of us on the planet might share. Others might/will translate Ovid, but only I will work toward a beginner’s level commentary, one similar to Pharr’s commentary on Vergil.
Not sure why now for this shift except to say that I know my time is finite. Yes, it always has been, that’s true, but now it seems existential. No, I’m not covering something up here, I’m not ill, in fact, I just got a set of labs that Kate says are typical of a 40 year old.
Long ago, in my 20’s, I read an article about when certain professions reach their maturity. You know the material about mathematicians and scientists, early ripe, but certain other professions matured much later, writers and artists, for example, with the oldest age of maturation according to this reckoning being 50, for philosophers.
Factoring in my drinking and an early career emphasis on politics and the practical side of religion, I don’t find 65 to far out of range for me. I feel mature in my thinking and writing skills now and I need to deploy them or my unique contribution will be lost.