Today’s hero: Takin' L’s

And it’s a good one, because the fellow who’s interviewed shrugs his shoulders and says, “Looks like we're just takin' Ls” in Philly right now, and then he smiles.

Ask any playwright, a tale is far more satisfying when a catharsis follows misery. We need an equilibrium even if we can’t find an explanation.

A friend of mine, a farmer, in despair over a lengthy drought asked me yesterday if I thought it was God’s divine plan. The attorney in me always instantly presents the counterargument: Why would you as a Christian presume God rather than Satan? She’s a nice person, so instead I responded that divine plan is my favorite coping mechanism once denial fails. I mean really, the brain likes to catalogue and organize and can always build a case, if one survives the torment, that big “if” never tacitly acknowledged in the adage, that for “Every door that closes another one opens.” A lovely and inspiring platitude, but logically: how couldn’t that be the case?

Furthermore, I am in the middle of an excellent but lengthy and depressing book by David Keys called “Catastrophe,” which disallows any sentimentality over a god personally interested in the happiness of its believers. It’s a history book about a climatic disaster in the early 560s AD which caused something, probably ash to cover the sun for a year and a half and spurred a drought and famine across the globe, followed shortly by unstoppable diseases whose spread was facilitated by the ecological imbalance, and which felled starving humans by the millions, at the same time providing opportunities to the most aggressive survivors which dramatically changed the course of history everywhere. He presents a detailed and compelling case, definitely striking discomforting chords in those of us watching the effects of human-induced climate change on its rapid roller coaster ride toward the destruction of the human race.

So, it’s morning and I want to meditate and manifest great things for my day and future, but I am not getting any further than thinking "I guess I’ll have to cover the blueberry bushes with that awful netting again to keep the crows and squirrels pecking at them from taking every single one" and "if my neighbor shoots skeet again tonight for another two and a half hours, I’m going to shoot him.” Next to ostensible liberty, the best thing about living in the US is freedom of thought, expressed as freedom of religion. And even if I shouldn't, I feel better already thinking this. Freud's "Civilization and Its Discontents" taught me the value of this. Close to freedom of religion is freedom of speech, but I suggest that a bit warily as we’ve all seen on the internet and from certain media outlets how hatred attracts the uneducated and psychopaths, and begets even more hatred, so it’s hard to pronounce that it’s unequivocally a good thing. I live a quiet life in a rural area where I have the luxury and silence to survey the world stage and the politics driving us to our doom a bit more objectively than those more fully immersed. But I also see firsthand how it is unreasonable to believe that this 50% of the population (rural America) who eats up false media and adores racism is capable of even grasping what is driving climate change, let alone accepting it and effectuating meaningful change. The fact that things are unlikely to change in time being quite depressing, I realize this guy is my role model too. I want to shrug and smile in the face of adversity. That’s life; sometimes we can’t change things and we take losses.

Of course, hope springs eternal and sometimes we feel that we can change things. Everyone wants their dreams to come true and our current understanding of quantum physics has opened the door to the possibility of choosing an unrealized probability and manifesting it. Who couldn’t be attracted to such a notion?  It’s not all that far from praying and making offerings to the gods, but it’s updated as well, sacrificial offerings especially are just not pc in our times. As the recipient of what I would deem psychic phenomenon, angel visitations, dream foreshadowings and the like most of my life, I’m all in to pathworking with the mystical Qabalah, known more colloquially as the Tree of Life, for advancing spiritually for what it may be worth and manifesting a more upbeat life. Now the Qabalah has its origins in Judaism, which I can’t profess to embrace in its entirety, but I do respect the thought that has gone and continues to go into it, and its divisions of reality, a holographic reality which sits more comfortably with me than any other and the fact that it is a living and adaptable system for comprehending the human experience. I have in the past only reached out to the levels of archangels I more readily comprehend, but this week I decided I’d start from the bottom, the god, archangel and others who interface between earthly integration and everything else and then move upward to the branches dealing with particular traits, like, strength, wisdom, understanding and so forth. So here I am calling on Adonai Ha Aretz, Malkuth and the multitude of intercessors available to the believer. Sadly, despite wearing citrine, burning both a citrine candle and the appropriate incense, playing the tone “A”, etc after three days, the usual green goddess wearing a crown had not yet appeared to me. And then in a flash this morning, I realized my earthly intercessor is the Blessed Virgin Mary of Guadalupe, which is totally cool because I love her and have ever since living in El Paso.

Frankly, I credit this mental recognition to this guy. This week's hero.