Strange week…
The world does move in mysterious ways, and it’s been a long, strange week. Christmas Eve I got a sore throat, and a cold coming on. I was still very happy to be able to join in the family celebrations and it’s the first time I can remember being happy that I just had a cold – as last year I had pneumonia and couldn’t go at all (also missed Thanksgiving) because we couldn’t afford to expose my grandparents.
Later in the week I had to cancel several social engagements as I was still too sick to go – including a big party Friday night that I was really looking forward to. Instead, I was hanging around watching a movie, when I got a call from a friend saying that he and his ex-wife were having a dispute and she was coming to pick up his daughter. I offered to do an emergency mediation, and we started at 9pm and went until 3am – a second session will be starting later today.
So much for resting :) but if I hadn’t had this cold I wouldn’t have been available for this far more important function. I still don’t know how it will affect the rest of the week – New Year’s is my birthday but somehow it doesn’t really seem to matter that much. If I end up sleeping off the events of the weekend that will be OK too. It’s all just life, in its endless journey.
I can’t help wondering…
When did we start calling prisoners of war “detainees”?? It sounds so innocuous, like they’re just being held for a few hours, then let go. But this term is being applied to foreign citizens (or enemy combatants, maybe) held for multiple years without trial, our own citizens who disappear without access to basic rights, etc. I was driving home last night and heard a reporter on NPR using this term. It just seems Orwellian to me, and I wonder how the administration got the media to buy into it so thoroughly that even independent public radio uses it. Now that I think about it, even “enemy combatants” is just a way to avoid saying “prisoners of war” and having the Geneva Conventions applied. Sigh…
Tarot Games
This solstice, I found myself over at a friend’s house enjoying the Yule fire, watching them craft, eating Christmas cookies, and playing tarot games, along with a small Solstice reading. This tarot game is fun and can be played by anyone with a tarot deck, whether or not you know how to read:
Each person in the room is dealt a hand of tarot cards equal to the number of other people in the room. You have to decide from among your hand which card represents each other person. One person starts by giving a card to the person they have chosen for that card and explains why they think it is right for that person. Then that person chooses someone to give a card to, and so on. At the end you have given away all your cards and you have all the cards that others have chosen for you in front of you.
We played this with the World Spirit deck, which seemed particularly appropriate for Solstice – here were the cards I received:
I really enjoyed these – It felt like a validation of an adventurous spirit, building on accomplishments, and celebrating with others (and maybe even a little romance and passion :). I’m going to take this as a positive sign for 2007.
Then we did some one-card readings. Since Solstice is the night on which the year pivots, it’s a particularly appropriate time to do readings that reflect on the moment. My retrospective has already been done, and on the New Year I’ll do a prospective look at the future. The one-card reading was on the question “What can I most productively focus on right now?” Interestingly, a couple of us got reversed cards. This suggested to us that there were things we were focusing on too much, that it would benefit us to relax about or let go, and this was the most important immediate message the tarot had for us in the now. My reversed card was the Sage of Pentacles:
After giving this some thought, I felt that his message for me was about enjoying the winter. Last year I had a miserable winter for all kinds of reasons – pneumonia, work, relationships, injury of a friend, weather. Nothing at all went well, and because of that I’ve been dreading this winter (even though it’s partially over already). Normally I really enjoy the turning of the seasons and the special qualities of all four seasons – it’s one reason I like to live in a place that has distinct seasons. This year I’ve just been mentally focusing on getting through the winter, and that’s not a great attitude, considering that if I really think about it, I’ve actually been having fun. As Solstice night is the dead of winter, this seems like a really good message at this time – here I am, surrounded by friends and having a wonderful evening. My calendar is full, and it’s just not a bad winter at all, in spite of the challenging weather. So, looking at this beautiful card, I should enjoy life as much as this Sage apparently is :)
P.S. The reason for these associations is that in my timing system, the King (or Sage) of Pentacles is the transition between winter and spring. Alternatively, he represents the last card in the deck, or the last week of the year – and in some ways, Solstice can be considered the end of the year or the transition between years.
Restless Days
It’s odd, I seem to be in the middle of controversy everywhere I go right now. First, there’s the interagency conflict over an environmental database, of all things. Then, the ATA Elections and getting them organized is causing a stir in some quarters. Then finally, one of my tarot clients and I are a little at odds about how to interpret and understand her readings – that’s always hard. Not to mention ALL the stuff in the papers – I won’t even go there.
Last night I was sitting around trying to figure out how to reduce this unsettled feeling. It seems like the wrong time of year to be in the midst of so many battles. Watching CSI was entertaining but didn’t really help :D What was really uncomfortable is that I started out the day yesterday determined to not get involved in these conflicts, but it didn’t work at all – I kept getting pulled into them. My one success yesterday was a potentially contentious conference call I was chairing on how to assess human health risk from eating fish, and happily enough, the participants of that call came to agreement on the points we were discussing – so no NEW problems to worry about and one step closer to a solution there.
So, as a start, I decided to go to bed reading my mediation journal, Conflict Resolution Quarterly. Perhaps reading about peace-making and restorative justice would help a little. At least I fell asleep quickly :) It does strike me as odd that one of the areas in which I am NOT experiencing conflict is in my mediation work!! Then today I decided that I just had to take stronger measures. I signed out of one e-mail discussion group that’s debating the elections, to give myself a break until after the holidays. I finished up the last tarot reading for my client, and it went well and made sense, hopefully to both of us. And I called the major players in the interagency dispute and at least it appears we have found some common ground and understanding for taking a positive step forward. If we’re lucky it will break a 7-month impasse on this issue.
Whew… crossing my fingers that I’m getting to a better place… I don’t feel quite there yet, but a little calmer at least. Maybe some Christmas baking…
The Power of Wind
Nature 2, Pierce County 0 – First the floods, now the wind… 1.5 million people without power. I can’t remember Seattle ever being 4/5 without power, that just never happens. I seem to know how to pick the windy places to live, and of course I must have my forest, soooo….
This cedar in my back yard actually came down last year in a windstorm in January, which for me was a lot worse than this one, though apparently not for everyone else. You may not be able to tell, but it was about 60 feet high. Thursday night I spent a good part of the night listening to the alders crashing down in the forest, hoping none of them was close enough to do major damage. I don’t know WHY these things always happen at night – there is nothing scarier than the sound of a tree splintering right before it is about to come down, especially when you know the sound very well and you can’t see where it is falling. I wasn’t really expecting three days without power – I spent a few days ensconced by the gas fire with Sophie, catching up on all those magazines I never have time to read. But by the third night I absconded to my Mom’s house for a shower and a warm bed :)
Coming home today I went out to survey the forest, not much to see in the way of wind damage but a couple of other nice finds:
Here’s the old stump of the cedar, which I quite like the look of – and right next to it is the stump of the 80′ hemlock I took down just before the windstorms – lucky for me. Both were growing on rotten old stumps and were very unstable. It’s unfortunate… these alders are getting pretty much to the end of their life cycle and have a tendency to fall. Many more windstorms like this one and I’ll need to do some serious replanting. A few evergreens wouldn’t be amiss… maybe next spring.
The News, and How to Read it
Today I was listening to Morning Edition on NPR, an interview with an outgoing UN Minister whose job it is to oversee the UN’s humanitarian missions. Mostly, the interview was about conditions in Darfur, but at one point the reporter asked whether the minister ever felt that he was doing a hopeless job, given what was going on there. The Minister (whose name I never heard) replied that no, having discussed it with his staff, he felt that the world is a much better place in 2006 than in 2003.
I thought, how could that be? – thinking of course of all that we read in the news about Iraq, Iran, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, etc. He went on to explain, describing how much conditions had improved in many African countries and giving a wide variety of examples. Then he said that where the UN had failed in its mission to protect the people was mainly in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Darfur – in which conditions had gotten much worse. I pondered this and realized that he had a much more global vision of the world than I did from our media. And from his perspective, many areas were improving. Many times I have heard that the US media treats certain Middle East issues as the be-all and end-all of world news, when to many other countries there is much more going on of interest.
I say this partly because the Iraqi situation is so disheartening and there seems no good solution. Every day we hear on the radio and read on the newspaper of the horrific attacks that constantly occur. Similarly, the Afghani president was moved to tears in trying to explain to the world community about all the children that are dying there due to insurgents and military action. This is all, ALL, we hear about – and we are helpless to prevent it, short of voting all the idiots out of office – and it may be far too late for that to really help.
So what is this post really about? First, that there is more to the news than what we constantly get barraged with. Listen to NPR, get an Internet feed from an international newspaper of good repute, and see what the rest of the world is talking about and preoccupied with. You might be surprised at how it’s not all about the Middle East (and it makes you wonder how we ever got in the position of our news BEING all about the Middle East).
Second, when life gets difficult and the news gets overwhelming, I like to play a little game with the newspaper. This is about putting things in balance. I think our media adds a lot of stress to our lives in ways that are subliminal – we constantly hear about all kinds of horrible things we can’t affect. Like much of the rest of life, we need to become more aware of the good things all around us. When even the UN commissioner in charge of humanitarian missions sees the world in a more positive way than most Americans, something is wrong.
So, here is the challenge – go through today’s newspaper and find three good things reported on. Post them here in a comment for everyone to see. They could be local, state, global, personal, anything at all. First you will see how hard it is to find anything – media bias in reporting, anyone? That just means we have to work all the harder to balance the constant barrage of negative images with some positive light. Not as a way of burying our heads in the sand, but to reduce the stress and realize that there are good things going on out there – and we could do more to support them.
Here are mine for the day (Tacoma News Tribune, Dec 12, 2006):
- Front page reporting on a community pilot project in Tacoma pairing at-risk communities, police officers and code inspectors to shut down drug houses, enforce code violations, clean up messes and eyesores, reduce violent crime and burglary, increase street lighting, and improve community morale. Four areas of the city were selected for the pilot project, which was by all accounts very successful – so much so that the city is planning to extend it into more neighborhoods next year.
- Republicans left a variety of spending bills unfinished in Congress this year, and the incoming chairmen in both the House and Senate are busily stripping out every single earmarked “pork” projects from the spending bills in preparation for passing them early next year. Finally, some common sense. Not that I think one party is any better at this than the other, but thankfully someone’s taking a stand on this, in spite of the fact that it will make many, many congressmen unhappy to lose their pet projects.
- I continue to be very happy with our Washington State governor, Chris Gregoire. We’ve had large budget surpluses recently, and her priorities for spending it have been the environment, improving math and science education, and changing the state constitution to set aside a large proportion of it for years when the economy is not so good (something the current financial structure does not allow for). And she came down hard on local pharmacies that refused to carry the morning after pill, canceling state purchasing contracts with those groceries and pushing the state pharmacy board to require pharmacists to fill all legally written prescriptions. Go Chris!
Let’s see what you’ve got!!
(this will be a little test to see if anyone actually reads a blog this long!)
2006 Retrospective
It’s that time of year – nearing winter solstice – when it is time to take stock of the past year, experience the moment and the turning of the year, and look forward to the future. A surge of tarot reading requests is coming in as others evaluate where they stand in their lives and what’s ahead. For myself, I think I will forgo the cards for this looking back and just rely on my memory :)
House and Garden – Well, this was one of the things I did right this year :) Having been in my house for only 6 months in January, there was still a lot of work to do. It’s amazing how much it takes to furnish an entire house when you’re starting with not much. Throughout the year I worked on finding just the right furniture, and with the help of my friend Rick, put it all together and moved it all around to the right places. Which finally enabled me to unpack some things, like all those boxes of books!!! It looks quite nice now. The pond and stream were built in the early winter months, and planted in the spring. Most of the summer and early fall was dedicated to building a multilevel deck with spa, which I am so very much looking forward to making good use of next summer. When I get a chance, I’ll make a page to put up some before and after pictures. The back yard is now a real haven, and I don’t think I’ll be doing much more work to the house.
Social Life – What an up and down year this was for relationships! I spent most of the year involved in a long-distance relationship with someone who was planning a separation and move, only to have it not happen at the last minute. Heart-wrenching and disappointing, but life goes on. Now I am really single, and doing my best to enjoy it. I lost one girlfriend to the aftermath of my divorce, but feel that I’ve become closer to the others – and have made some local friends to have gaming geek nights with :) My online friendships are as strong as ever, and for that I am eternally grateful (you know who you are). I have a new cat, Sophie, who keeps me company when I’m home alone, which is a lot of the time (working from home).
Work – Speaking of work, it’s been a relatively good year. I’ve had some great contracts and made a bit more money than last year, which was good considering all the furniture I had to buy and the cost of deck materials!! The most exciting news is the Governor’s Puget Sound Alliance, aimed at cleaning up pollution and water quality problems in Puget Sound on a grand scale. A good deal of that money has filtered down to the Dept. of Ecology where I used to work, and I was on two of the three winning teams for that 2-yr contract. Lots of work is coming through and I’m honored to be contributing to that effort. Next year already looks good, it’s nice not to have to worry about contracts. I’d really love to make a little extra and get to travel somewhere, but that’s definitely in the wait-and-see category.
Health – Wow, well, I started the year recovering from 2 months sick with pneumonia, so it really could only go up from there. Migraines and associated sleepiness from medication continue to be an ongoing issue, but that’s not likely to change anytime soon and I’m dealing with it as usual. The good news is I am eating much more healthily and have lost about 12 pounds. A farm share with a local organic farm here in Puyallup has really contributed to that. Also I have finally resolved a chronic rotator cuff injury through yoga and nautilus, and am very happy about that. I’m seeing a few signs of middle-age in my skin and hair, so have started a new skin care regime to try to be proactive about it. All in all though, I’m feeling young, and that’s what counts :)
Tarot – My one big failure this year was not finishing my latest book. I got derailed early on, mostly by relationship/emotional issues that were taking a lot out of me to process. I never quite got back into the swing of it. I’m still hoping to continue writing and finish close to the March deadline my publisher set last time we talked, though I realize that could be tough. Otherwise though, things are going great – had a lot of fun at the Reader’s Studio this year in New York, and sometime about mid-year took over management of the online tarot discussion list Comparative Tarot from the former list-owner, a dear friend. That’s been a blast, and I am still doing lots of tarot readings as usual. I have also started teaching on-line classes more regularly, and plan to continue that on into the next year (you can find a list of my current classes on my website, TarotMoon, on the Articles page).
What else?? Well, this blog is new!! Hope you’re enjoying it as much as I am :)
Book Review – VoiceMale
I usually don’t read books about relationships or dating – they’re almost always written by and for women, and you have to wonder how well they really represent the man’s point of view. This book caught my eye though, because it’s written and researched by a man and entirely composed of the voices of men on topics like dating, relationships, marriage, sex, housework, fidelity… lots of interesting stuff. Here, I thought, was my chance to hear the real deal – and I wasn’t disappointed. One of the strengths of this book is that there are a large number of interviews with men of all generations, cultures, and socio-economic classes. It’s particularly fascinating to see how attitudes have changed through the generations.
Some of the most interesting findings for me:
- In first meeting a woman, men do look for looks – but not perfection. The interviews seemed to show that men more often picked out one or two special features of a woman, like a nice smile or beautiful eyes – and still saw those beautiful things in their wives decades later.
- In looking for a partner, the most important attribute is a positive temperament – optimism, cheerfulness, enthusiasm, energy, warmth. Complaining, sarcasm, picky eating – all turn-offs. Men are looking at the long-term here, to what a day-to-day relationship might be like. Of all the valuable information I picked up in this book (for a newly single gal) this one really stood out.
- Issues that most often derail a marriage within the first few years – sharing money, balancing family with outside interests, relations with in-laws, maintaining interest in sex. This last seems to be a product of the “love cocktail” or “honeymoon effect” – that heightened romance and passion that is present in the first few years (or months) of a relationship, which eventually settles down into something more everyday. Power struggles in general are also an issue as the new relationship gets sorted out. In previous generation, each partner had a sphere of influence within the marriage that was relatively well-understood. Now both partners are expected to be more equal, which means that just about everything has to be negotiated and they can’t just settle into previously defined roles. Husbands in successful marriages stated that the key to the first few years of marriage was in learning how to handle disagreements.
- Men frequently define their worth through work – especially after they get married and have a family to support. It makes no difference whether the wife is working too. Working hard is a measure of their love, as well as their own self-worth. So it is frequently baffling to them when their wives complain about feeling neglected and unloved. This is largely a matter of culture and the values instilled in them by their own fathers, and there is a generational conflict here as modern men struggle to balance the expectations of their modern wives with the values instilled in them by their parents. This was one of the major insights I eventually gained into my own marriage – it didn’t help me feel any better, but it did at least help me understand what was going on.
- Women are far more emotionally involved with sex than are men. A frequent misunderstanding between married couples arises when a couple has a fight and subsequently, the wife doesn’t feel like having sex. Men often believe the wife is punishing them by withholding sex, while the woman doesn’t understand how the man can expect her to have sex when she’s upset. It was very interesting to me that many men didn’t get the connection between emotion and passion, even after being married for decades.
- Both men and women reported far greater satisfaction in their sex lives when they felt that the household chores were equitably shared – a very interesting connection suggesting that respect and general household satisfaction are important to sexual enjoyment. Note the word “equitably” – equal division is not necessary as long as the partners felt that the arrangement was fair and mutually agreed upon.
- Long-married men do experience much greater frustration over lack of sexual interest in their wives than do women, especially in the “empty-nest” years when they may have been looking forward to greater opportunity for intimacy. However, no matter how difficult the situation, the vast majority of men who have been married that long opt not to have affairs. They’re not happy about it, but the value of the marriage in other ways is important to them. Overall and aside from these difficulties, married men are far happier with their sex lives than single men.
- Men feel closest to their partners when doing something active together, like a project around the house or a cross-country trip. Side-by-side togetherness feels far more comfortable and enjoyable than face-to-face sharing of emotions and talking. Doing things for their partner and just being there may be how a man expresses his love, rather than saying “I love you.”
VoiceMale – What Husbands Really Think About Their Marriages, Their Wives, Sex, Housework, and Commitment
Neil Chethik, 2006, Simon & Schuster
Talking while Eating
I’ve never been able to manage talking and eating at the same time… I don’t mean talking with your mouth full, but just the basics of holding a conversation over a nice meal. I often find myself unexpectedly choking on my food, to the point where both I and my friends who know me well enough start laughing, rather than the possibly more appropriate concerned response. I’ve often wondered if I have some strange problem, like the little valve at the back doesn’t close right, or something.
Today I was reading an interesting article about the evolution of speech from chimps (who are vocal to some extent) to humans. It turns out there are three parts to this – physical changes to the mouth, expansion of the brain to hold more vocabulary, and development of the ability to put the words you know together in an infinite variety of ways. Concerning the first of these, the article states, “Changes to the position and shape of our tongue have enhanced our vocal communication by enabling us to generate more distinct vocal sounds that reduce ambiguity… Because these changes also increase the risk of choking on our food, the communicative advantages must outweigh the potential costs.” Aha! So I’m just a product of evolution in action :) Science 314:926.
Another interesting tidbit from the article, “One obvious benefit [of faster human speech] is that rapid communication reduces the demands on working memory – preventing us from forgetting the beginning of a sentence before hearing its end.” I don’t think I even need to comment on that one :D
The Writing Blues
The last few days, I sit down to write and somehow just don’t feel like it – lose my inspiration, no bright ideas popping into my head. It’s a full moon in Gemini, so you’d think it’d be easy to write, but it isn’t. I think the problem is, I want a real person to talk to. Now and then, like any single person I guess, I get the lonelies. I talk to my friends online – and am always thankful for the Internet – but at some point late in the evening, start to get wistful that the talking’s just on my screen. It seems like my life goes on just fine and happily most of the time, but I get ambushed by these sudden feelings of loneliness that come out of nowhere. I haven’t quite figured out what to do about them… what box to put them in, where to stow them until they go away and I can get on with life again.
Being really single with my own place for the first time in my life (at 42), I can say there are some things I really like about it. My schedule is my own – and being a person with a very odd schedule, that’s no small thing. I can sleep and wake when I need to, and my health and sanity benefits from that. I’m pretty much of a neatnik, but at the same time, if I just feel like not doing the dishes until later – I can (fortunately that doesn’t get out of hand!). My cat and I share a love of quiet, solitude, and peace in the house.
From all this I am sensing that it’s going to take some doing for me to ever want to entirely share a house with someone else again. I could be totally wrong about that, but I’m envisioning somehow a committed relationship with private spaces – separate houses or some kind of interesting arrangement. Some of my friends and I have talked about having a semi-communal living space someday – a large piece of land (in my dreams with a forest, stream, beach…) where each person has their own little cabin but we all share a garden, communal kitchen and gathering space, library, hot tub… The perfect blend of solitude and company.
In the meantime though, until this utopian vision can somehow be realized, there are those nights like tonight when I would have liked nothing more than to have someone here to make dinner with, enjoy interesting conversation, cuddle on the couch, sleep next to, and wake up to. I kinda miss that reading the morning paper after a nice night before, casually enjoying your cheerios together while exclaiming about the politics in the editorial section :) It’s hard to know what to do with that need when there’s really no choice but to just wait until it goes away, as you can’t just conjure up someone temporary – or even if you could, it wouldn’t feel the way it needs to feel.
Ah well… it’s late. At least I have my cat. When she cuddles up next to me and drapes her little arms and head on mine, I feel a little comfort and company :) Time for bed…
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