Burrowing or Skating?
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This week I’d planned to do so much, but instead found myself relaxing at home, and drifting in the news cycle of Canada's new cabinet, the US impeachment hearings, and for good measure watching Season 3 of The Crown. Gives me a strange viewpoint, watching history instead of reading it. Is it history as drama or drama as history?
This week I felt less focused, with no single idea to expound and expand on. It took time for me to see this week’s topic wasn’t on the surface of the rise and fall of news, the thrill of knowing the Sisters film was a success, or the clarity of Sasha Baron Cohen's voice. I’ve included that stuff at the end here.
I seem to be going underground in a seasonal withdrawal, burrowing. Kind of like the image of little homes beneath the earth held in place by the roots of the barren trees. This fairy tale idea isn't a fantasy. I think it can be more than true.
Our unreal 24/7/365 life pattern occurs in an electric efficiency model of time and effort that our insane culture has overlaid onto the real pattern of time and seasons. It doesn't account for the great shifts and waves of seasonal forces that we are all part of. Sometimes we fight it with our schedules and obligations. Our SAD lamps. I believe it is possible to harmonize.
I'm not saying, grizzly style, "Time for the cave, see you in spring!” Humans don't hibernate, we step out into the cold of a short day and do stuff. Within the waves of the rising and setting sun, the waxing and waning moon, and the seasons, we find ways to harmonize our surface goals, activities, thoughts, and feelings. At this time of year we can also do everything with an awareness of slowly incubating something new.
It's like skaters on a mountain lake; skating on the transparent ice, looking down to clearly see all the stones below the surface. What was in the depths is now visible, but frozen until spring.
For me change comes gradually. It can cook slowly for days or months or years, in the unseen. In what finally comes out of the cosmic oven, the ingredients that went in there may be unrecognizable. It's a mysterious alchemy and we all get to be part of it, whether we know it or not. Something is always emerging.
Thanks for taking the leap with me as I explore. As I told you at the beginning of this newsletter exercise, in these Personal Papers I want to go closer to the unknown than to the known. Late November seems to be taking me there.
I can’t wait to see this movie, successfully premiered in Montreal last week. Congratulations to everyone involved! Here’s the trailer.
With the latest revelations today that Facebook let the Trump 2016 campaign post ads on credit, I’m disturbed. But grateful to see Sasha Baron Cohen's speech to the Anti-Defamation League. He is so coherent and aware. You may have seen clips, but here it is in full.
And read the full transcript in the Guardian.
By the way, that skating video was shot near Exshaw, the cement-dust town that I mentioned a few posts ago - looks like all the pollution is long gone.
Apologies for any typos. As someone said, this sort of thing is an artisanal personal project, so it may have some flaws from time to time. Bring on the ho'oponopono.
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