Looks like a big year

It looks like this is going to be a big year.

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I went to the Ecosophian Convention in June. That was big, right there.

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I mentioned a while ago that I'm back to work on my book. My goal is to self-publish successfully this year. I don't expect to make a lot of money at it, although it would be nice if Fate proved me wrong. But it explains an obscure, niche topic. The natural audience is probably not large, and I've never been very good at publicizing myself. The goals that I hope to achieve include:

• proving that I can set and achieve a long-term goal;
• learning about the self-publication process, so I can plan to publish some of the other stuff bubbling in my head;
• opening up the possibility for my sons that they can achieve things in life above and beyond holding a regular job, because it is always easier to do a thing if you see someone else do it first. (To be clear, my own father was rather weak on the "holding a regular job" part, so that was the first thing I wanted to model for them!)

But there is more. Turns out that the world doesn't revolve around me. 😀

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Wife moved from living with Son1 to living near Son2. Son1 and Son2 organized the whole move between themselves, and are handling the aftermath.

Son1 will be moving in with Dorcas soon. Son2 proposed to Beryl.

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Debbie has had multiple spells of atrial fibrillation. Already this year she has had a device inserted into her heart to help regularize its behavior, and she is on medication to help with that as well. We still talk regularly every Friday afternoon, but more and more those conversations tend to drift over to talking about death. She's still making plans for the future, but more and more she talks about wanting things to be in order by the time she is no longer there to order them.

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Because Debbie has been thinking about death, she has been pushing our Unitarian Sangha to establish a Care-Taking Council. I wrote about the very first steps ... setting up an exploratory committee to review the idea ... back in 2025. But most of the activity will take place this year.

Also related to that, this spring our Sangha held its first ever Day of Mindfulness. We are slowly stretching out of a fixed and unchanging shape that we've held for some 20 years.

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Marie's favorite nephew was arrested by TSA. Turns out he was on a cruise with his parents (Marie's sister Cuñada, and her current husband). TSA explored his tablet, and found pornography on it. Some of the pornography involved subjects below the legal age of consent. This translates to five years in prison—automatically—without the possibility of parole. Marie is beside herself—partly at the fate of her nephew, of course, but partly because of the nature of the offense. She has not said so, but my guess is that years ago (before we got back together and she started to re-evaluate her attitudes towards sex), she would have approved of such a law. Today she hates it because it endangers Nephew. There are probably other complexities as well ... Marie generates emotional complexity effortlessly.

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I'm in a fight with my professional organization. I don't know why I care, and some days I don't. It's not like I'm working any more. My membership expires this month. Maybe I'll just let it go. Still, if I do, that's another milestone for this year.

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At the end of June, Schmidt wrecked his car. He described it this way:

"Driving to town for groceries and prescriptions.  Just a mile or two out of town, got distracted trying to let a wasp out the window, drifted just enough to hit a mailbox that (due to prior vandalism I suppose) was anchored with steel and concrete like a damn skyscraper and totally wrecked the car.  Flipped, rolled, slid... good thing I'm in the habit of doing only 60 on that part of the road!  Seat belt & air bags did their job and I crawled out the (pulverized) passenger side window with just some cuts and bruises.  Somebody came along just as I got out and used his cell phone to call 911 -- I was still dazedly trying to collect myself and wondering how to use my phone without  my glasses (knocked off and god-knew-where).... Cue EMTs, Highway patrol, tow truck -- tow operator finally found my glasses for me (way in the back of what's left of the car) so I can see again."

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My former boss wrote me that he is afraid of being laid off, because the huge company that we both worked for is doing lots of business except not in his country.

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Numerologically, 2026 is a "1-year" because 2 + 0 + 2 + 6 = 10, and 1 + 0 = 1. According to John Michael Greer, 1-years are: 

"Ruled by the Sun, this is a number of new beginnings and opportunity. This is a time of practical action and constructive change.  It's a good time to take direct action and to start new things in motion, so long as they aren't complex or evasive. Move ahead forcefully during this year."

All-righty then!

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Have I forgotten anything? Maybe. Probably

Is there more that I don't know about? Gosh, I hope not!

           

Son 2 is engaged!

Friday morning, I got a call from Son 2. Wow, two calls in less than a week? What's the occasion?

Turns out he wanted to let me know that Amazon had just made a delivery ... to deliver an expensive package he had ordered not long ago ... containing the engagement ring he had ordered for Beryl.

This is not a picture of Beryl's ring, but just some
random ring I found on the Internet. But that's OK.
I haven't seen Beryl's yet, but this will do.

Aha. Wait ... engagement ring?

Yes, exactly.

And then he told me the story behind it. He burbled. He was clearly—and rightly—very excited. Thrilled. Dancing on air.

And I'm glad for him. As disappointing as my own marriage was in some ways, there is nothing quite like the thrill when you are just about to embark on it. I'm glad he has been able to experience the "dancing on air" feeling.

The back story? Well apparently they've been talking for a while about getting married. Son 2 said that Beryl told him a while ago, If you don't get around to proposing to me this year, I'm going to propose to you next year. And he added that "getting around to things" is often an observable problem for us Tanatus; it's very easy for us to decide that things are good-enough, and just stay in a rut for the longest time before taking any action to change it. So clearly Son 2 chose to break out of this mold, and take decisive action.

He sounds a lot like me, back forty-something years ago when I decided to propose to Wife.

On the other hand, Beryl was out in the field for work right now, and he had not gotten her agreement before buying the ring. Did I mention it was expensive? Now the odds were naturally in favor of her accepting. And they had discussed in general terms what kind of ring she would like, if he were to get her one. He used that discussion to inform his ordering.

So at the time he called me, he was in possession of a Very Expensive Ring, with only a strong hunch that she would say Yes.

Spoiler alert: Of course she said Yes. That was the sum of this morning's text message. So I passed the word to Mother, to Brother and SIL, to Debbie, to Marie and Schmidt. We all agree it's a very exciting time. And, as I say, I'm glad for him.

Do I expect the marriage to go well? I have no idea. They've been together for more than four years now, but I still don't know Beryl very well. When I was courting (living with) Wife before we were married, we lived in an apartment that was just a mile from my parents' house and we came over often for dinner. We were together for a year before the wedding, and by that time my parents had gotten to know her very well ... for good or ill. Son 2 has taken deliberate steps to make sure that didn't happen to him and Beryl. So most of what I know about her is that Son 2 is thrilled to be with her. And I am aware that after a while the romantic thrill passes.

So a little later Friday morning, I pulled out my Tarot deck and asked the question, If Son 2 marries Beryl, will it be a good thing in his life? It's a yes/no question, so I laid out the kind of 5-card reading that I describe (for example) here or here. This reading gives three answers: if they are all Yes or all No, that answers the question; if they are mixed, then the picture is more complicated.

To repeat the question: If Son 2 marries Beryl, will it be a good thing in his life?

Answer: 2 Swords reversed, 5 Wands, Page Pentacles reversed, Queen Cups reversed, Chariot.

• That works out to No, No, and No. 
• I read the individual cards as follows:
• 2 Swords reversed: Son 2 has picked a definite direction, instead of letting himself be paralyzed by sloth or indecision. Doesn't make it a good direction, but it's definite.
• 5 Wands: Family fights. Between the two of them? With her family? With his family? I have no idea.
• Page Pentacles reversed: The book I use glosses this as "Surrounded by people with ideas in opposition to his own," which might explain the family fights (if, for example, his in-laws prove hostile). But this is also the reverse of the card that showed him going to graduate school, so I suppose it might also mean No professional advancement, or Loss of money. Tarot is multivalent that way.
• Queen Cups reversed: My book glosses this as, "Her imagination runs away with her." Is that Beryl? Or does it refer (despite the sex) to Son 2? Does either or both of them have unrealistic expectations for the marriage? (I mean, probably. I think most couples do.)
• Chariot: He may succeed through very hard work, and the marriage may be a steadying factor in his life. He may exercise a lot of control to keep it out of a ditch. But he'll have to.      

Now of course there are a lot of disclaimers that belong here. I've been reading Tarot for a few years, but I wouldn't say I'm brilliant at it. Many of my own readings are a little mystifying to me still, or else they make sense just because my own life is so small and closed, so simple and repetitive. Also, it is supposed to be hard to read Tarot accurately when you are emotionally involved in the outcome. Well, I was. When I shuffled the cards to lay them out, I was still giddy with a kind of contact-high or contagious excitement from our phone call. And in the other direction, my own marriage obviously didn't go that well ^{[citation needed]}, so maybe I'm at risk for worrying too much about him. All of these things are possible.

But mostly I just felt like this reading described my marriage. I blundered into it by making a willful decision to go ahead, I had to learn to exert enormous control, and indeed it did stabilize me. At the same time it exposed me to plenty of fights, plenty of opposition, and plenty of runaway imagination.

Oh, wait. Maybe that's where the disclaimer belongs. Maybe when I laid out the cards, they showed my my marriage and not Son 2's. That would explain why the message looked so familiar.

In any event, I won't tell them what I read. That could turn the prophecy self-fulfilling, when in fact it might just be wrong. I guess we'll see, ... over the next thirty years or so.

I hope it's wrong. And I wish them both well. 

           

My cough is back, 3

This is not me, obviously. But sometimes it feels like it might as well be.

I'm writing and posting this today to put a mark on the calendar. I hope I'm wrong, but it feels like today is the beginning of Coughing Season for me. Yes, it's the same damned allergic cough that I've complained about regularly for years (and that I've lived with regularly since long before I started complaining in these pages). Look up the posts tagged "cough" and you'll see what I mean.

Based on my calculations last spring, I guess this season—if that's what it is—should last till the end of February. Four months. That gives me hope for an endpoint.

It's funny how sharp the dividing line can be between On and Off. Over the last couple weeks I've had moments where it feels like my allergies are building up, but they have passed immediately and not returned until days later. I'm pretty sure I haven't taken a single cough drop since last February. Today I took five of them, to calm and soothe my throat. 

Just in time for the holidays, I guess. And in other news, ... I visited with Wife this afternoon and we talked very civilly for a couple of hours.

Magical tales 3, bindings and blowback

I've told you some stories before about Wife's magical workings, for example here and here. Both of those posts also included commentary by John Michael Greer, after I had described some facet of the working to him. Well, I've got another. This is one I had forgotten all about until the first time (a couple years ago, I think) that I read Greer talk about bindings.

A magical binding is a spell you cast on someone else that prevents him from doing some particular thing. Greer has talked about these more than once in his blogs, as a way to illustrate a point about magical ethics that he calls "the raspberry jam principle." The principle runs like this: You can't spread raspberry jam without getting it all over your fingers or the table. In the same way, when you direct magic at somebody else, the very same energies are going to affect you too. The idea, therefore, is that you should never aim a spell at someone else that you aren't willing to undergo yourself, because sure as anything the blowback will catch you.

This also means that if you want to use magic to control someone else's behavior, you have to be very careful how you craft the spell. Greer has told the story more than once that early in his career as a mage, he was good friends with a woman who was threatened by a rapist. (I don't remember if this was her husband, or a domestic partner, or a stranger.) Greer protected her by putting a binding on this fellow that prevented him from raping. And Greer explained to his readers that he was careful to prevent the offender from raping, and not from all sexual contact. His point was that he knew the very same binding would affect him too. But he accepted that consequence, because he didn't want to rape anyone anyway! So it was no problem for him that the spell which blocked the other guy blocked him too.

Anyway, in today's Magic Monday post, someone asked about bindings again. Greer told his story. And I remembered something that had happened to Wife almost 25 years ago.

Back when the Twin Towers fell, Wife was still unambiguously Wiccan. (Her entanglement with Christianity came later.) Like many people she was angry about the attack, and felt that she wanted to Do Her Part in some way. And she hit on the idea of putting a binding on Osama bin Laden, so that he would be immobilized. So that he couldn't do anything. 

I don't know the details of the ritual. (I was generally supportive of her worship, but I wanted to stay away from this working.) I do remember that she made a doll to represent Osama, and then bound it with rope or twine—so that, symbolically, it was bound hand and foot and couldn't do anything—and tossed it in the back of the closet to sit in the dark. Doubtless there was more to it as well.

To this day, I have no idea whether her working had even the slightest effect on Osama bin Laden himself. I kind of assume not, partly because Wife was no mage, and partly because there were so many other people in the world wishing him (respectively) good or ill that I figure her spell likely got lost in the shuffle.

But interestingly enough, she got very sick after that--so sick that for the next two years or so she could scarcely crawl out of bed even just to go to the bathroom. She couldn't work. She couldn't look after the children. (We had to hire a nanny, and I didn't make all that much money. Interesting times.) In fact, she couldn't ... umm ... do anything! Wait, really?

At the time I never connected her illness with her working against Osama. But now after reading Greer for some years, I no longer treat the synchronicity as a coincidence.

I posted this story on Greer's blog. His reply was brief, but to the point:

Typical blowback. Never, ever cast a spell on anyone else you wouldn't want to experience yourself...because you will experience it, whether you want to or not.

And that, I guess, is that.     

      

Blast from the past: Intentions

Hosea's log: Star date 1992-10-11 ... or it might have been 1992-11-10. It was well into the autumn of 1992, and right around the full moon—maybe plus or minus a day. No more than a day.

People who are comfortable with what might be called the woo-woo end of New Age spirituality sometimes talk about "releasing intentions into the Universe." It's not always clear how this differs either from prayer or from magic, but the language is vague enough to offer plausible deniability if one is challenged by a hard-core materialist. "Oh no, I wasn't doing anything supernatural. I was just focusing my attention on a certain goal for the sake of psychological clarity."

The thing is, sometimes it works. Debbie once told me that a few months before she and I met up again after twenty years, she found herself getting tired of living alone after her divorce, and released an intention into the Universe that she meet someone romantically. Then she met me.

Normally I'm not really organized enough to do the same thing, but I remember one time that I definitely did. It was a long-term intention; and while I didn't follow up scrupulously to check every bit of it against a schedule, in the long run it did more or less come true as well.

The time was 1992. I was working a contract job nearly 120 miles from home—by which I mean the apartment I shared with Wife, while she was in graduate school. I drove down on Monday morning and back on Friday evening. During the week I stayed with my parents, which was just a little over 40 miles away from my work. The traffic was terrible, and I wasn't making a lot: enough to pay our rent, but not enough to keep up with Wife's already-riotous spending. But it was what I could get, and all that driving didn't leave me a lot of time to look for a better job.

For some years I had still nursed fantasies of going back to graduate school myself. I had left abruptly (as I describe briefly here) and my faculty advisor was kind enough to hold open my space in my fellowship program for one year. Well, by this time it had been closer to six years, and I wasn't still in touch with him. But I still clung to the fantasy that maybe someday I could go back.

Then in the fall of 1992 I learned that my former faculty advisor had died. Of course there was no realistic way that I would ever have gone back, but this shattered my fantasy. I wept for him—by which of course I mean "for myself and my lost dreams"—harder than I have ever wept for a dead relative. And then, not long after, I found myself walking out to the parking lot after another long day, after sunset, with the stars twinkling, and the most enormous full moon hanging just over the horizon.

Do breakups cause breakage?

So here I am, minding my own business, reading John Michael Greer's "Magic Monday" column, and someone writes in anonymously to say, "at the end of my marriage, everything started breaking, one thing after the other." Someone else replies, "The day [my partner] died my phone went haywire too."

And suddenly I remember. The first time I had Debbie as a guest in my new apartment, after I left Wife, I went to make us a pot of tea and the handle broke off the tea pot. (Interestingly, the tea pot had been a wedding present to Wife and me; I no longer remember who from, but since I ended up with it, it might have been from one of my friends.) Debbie suggested that this was a sign, and I should get rid of the teapot. But I kept it. Only now if I want to use it, I use hot pads so I can pick it up by the body to pour it.

And I remember the first time Marie came to visit me, a few years later. She broke a crystal butter dish that I had salvaged when Wife and I divided everything up. There was no way to keep using that, so yes, I discarded it into the trash.

So now I wonder: is this a repeatable phenomenon? Do breakups cause breakage?

Inquiring minds want to know ....  

     

Wrapping up last year

I keep thinking I should write something about the last … gosh, I guess three months of last year. I keep not wanting to do it. Not that there's anything bad about it. I just can't summon the energy.

This is an omnibus post. The only common theme is that I'm too lazy to break it out into multiple different posts. Or maybe I should say that empirically I have already observed a strong tendency not to write it. So tonight I figured, "Better to get it all written than to worry about the details." I count 14 different tags or labels on this post right now. Maybe I'll add more later. That should be a sign that it really does tell multiple stories.

October

Actually I guess I've already talked about a lot of it. In October I traveled to visit Debbie for a week, and we went on a silent meditation retreat. (The retreat lasted just a weekend, so we also spent time visiting her family.) Then I flew on to another town where Marie was attending a conference. I appeared with her at the big dinner, as arm candy, and otherwise wandered around town while she attended multiple sessions. I think I talked about this trip in this post here. (See also this one, for a slice of life around Debbie's family.)

November

In November, Mother and I joined Brother and SIL in driving all day to visit family in another state over, for Thanksgiving. I talk about some parts of that trip in this post here. There were other parts of the visit as well, but I don't remember anything so important that I need to remember it or write about it. Stan was better behaved than he was five years ago, and easily distracted with Monty Python routines. This time it was his little sister who was the terror, but not as destructively.

History rhymes, Lily, and Movie meme 9

Where do I start with this? I want to tell a story about visiting with the family for Thanksgiving, and also to introduce a name for a character I've mentioned before. She's dead, but "only in the technical sense." And as I give her a name, I also want to give her a cinematic face. So many things to do.

My cousin and her mother-in-law

Let's start with today and work backwards. A month ago, Mother and Brother and SIL and I all drove to where my aunts and uncles (and all their children) have settled. It's in another state, but reachable in a day's driving. I mention this year's trip here, and I've talked about making the same trip before, around other Thanksgivings (for example here or here or here).

Anyway, while I was there I stayed with one aunt and my uncle. Some of that time was spent cooking for The Big Day. Some of it was spent in silence, or just reading placidly. And occasionally we visited with other members of the family.

Once day, her oldest daughter came over. (This is my cousin C.) The nominal reason for her visit was to discuss some aspect of the food preparation for Thanksgiving. But then she started talking to my aunt about how things were going at home. C's husband is from Latin America, and last year his mother emigrated from the Old Country to the USA to live with them. C's mother-in-law is wheelchair-bound and doesn't speak much English. Also, she complains chronically. Whenever she makes any comment on anything, it's a negative comment. C is having a lot of trouble dealing with this ongoing criticism. My aunt talked to her for a while. I was sitting in the same room reading, so I heard what was going on. But nobody invited me into the conversation, so I stayed out of it.

But I remembered what she said. And a few days later, when the whole family was out to dinner one evening, I motioned C over so I could talk to her for a few minutes. What I told her was something like this:

Answer to Kimberly

Last Saturday, I left a question for Kimberly Steele about this job that has come up through my former employer, BehemothCo.

Kimberly, bless her, responded here rather than just deleting my question.

I replied to her answer: briefly here in a comment on her blog, and at greater length in a post here on mine.

So far, so good.

And then, in a burst of generosity not to be imagined, Kimberly replied to my blogpost in a comment here, which runs as follows.

Kimberly Steele here, thanks for sharing this. It seems to me your Tarot are telling you the same things as my Ogham. From what I can tell, you sincerely want to take the job and you want to move away, but both your Tarot and my Ogham are saying you would come to regret it. If you need to take the job and relocate because it is your heart's desire, then go ahead. Sometimes we can only learn certain lessons the hard way.

You also have other choices -- one is taking a local job or joining a local volunteer group or other Meetup for structure. You could also look into living and working in someplace that is not related to this job. The point is you have options even if you feel emotionally blinded to them right now.

Pause with me for a minute to appreciate what this comment means to me.

The frustrations of divination

I told you all about the possible job that I've been discussing with a recruiter from my former employer (affectionately nicknamed BehemothCo for the purposes of this blog). At this point, I have spoken to the recruiter, to the hiring manager, and (just this afternoon) to the two most senior employees in the department.

I have also—this should be no surprise—been consulting divination. The problem is that the message I get from divination is consistently different from the message that I get from my regular human interactions. But of course divination doesn't speak English, and there's always the possibility that it's not true. But I remember enough times in the past that it has described reality that I am reluctant to dismiss it. This means that I am stuck.

What do I want?

Yesterday I spent several hours reviewing my resume and preparing for my interview. I had the interview. Then I wrote up my notes, looked up some relevant data online, went to the store, and talked with Brother on the phone for an hour afterwards. It was a very productive day.

Today I accomplished bugger-all, except for sending a couple of (very belated) thank-you notes for the interviews, and going to Sangha in the evening. Maybe it's just a reaction against having actually achieved something yesterday, but I also think that my compulsively doom-scrolling Twitter might be a way to avoid thinking about what I really want.

Do I want a new job? I don't know. But I do think I have stumbled on the worst way to find out.

Blast from the past: The Baptists and the rest of us

I've explained how Wife started attending Christian churches, and how she ended up at an Evangelical Baptist church. (OK, strictly speaking I don't have a story about how she ended up there in particular. But she was church-shopping, and that's the one she settled on.) I've told you a story which let you know that the Senior Pastor was willing to go out on a limb and try something unusual. How did the rest of us end up there?

[What follows is an account based on a long email I wrote to Marie in May of 2016, with minor additions or adjustments where suitable.]

Once Wife settled on a church, she started asking us to go with her. The boys had no special interest, but they were still little kids at this point. Clearly it wasn't up to them. I had no special interest either. Wife insisted that it made her look bad if we didn't come with her. I told her this was silly, but I didn't have the vocabulary to explain that the whole idea was absurd. Really, Babe, it's not all about you.

Now, this was while I was out of work. [Let's call it 2003.] And Wife was being particularly unsupportive: indeed, it felt like not only did I have to be looking for work 8 hours a day but I had to be managing her anxiety (and her consequent shrewishness and regular threats to divorce me) something like 16 hours a day. It wasn't much fun. Anyway, I finally sat her down to talk earnestly, and made a deal with her: I would attend church with her (and put the boys in Sunday School) if she would commit to behaving in a Christ-like way. (And of course I meant this in the sense that her church was teaching her to understand the word "Christ-like": I certainly didn't want her to behave like the rabble-rouser who smashed up the tables of the money-changers in the Temple!) She said she didn't think she could possibly do that; I said "Of course not, not under your own power. So if you succeed in doing it anyway, that's proof that God is helping you; and in that case God must be real and I'm willing to go to church." Well, the bargain didn't hold forever—after a while she had started an everything-but-physical-sex emotional affair with the Lead Tenor in the church choir—but for a while it bought me a bit of peace. So sure, hell, why not? Besides, this gave me a whole new vocabulary with which to try to talk her out of her crazier and more destructive behaviors.

 [Now that I think about it, I give the details of the contract itself in this post here. Go read it. But I don't talk about the aftermath.]

Blast from the past: Stigmata

Strictly speaking this story isn't necessary to explain how we ended up attending a Baptist church for a few years. That story will be adequately covered by the previous post and the next one. But it fits nicely between them, because it took place after Wife had started regularly attending the Evangelical Baptist Church near us, and before the rest of us started attending as well. And maybe—just maybe—it might help add some layers of nuance to the generally dismal and dispiriting picture that I have painted of Wife in this blog. (See also, for example, this post here.)

One Sunday morning, Wife left for church at the normal time. By this time she had passed through the Pentecostal churches of he church-shopping phase, and had settled down at an Evangelical Baptist church not too far away from us. While she was gone, the boys and I did whatever we did. I assume they played in the back of the house somewhere. I might have done the breakfast dishes, or just sat in the living room to read.

At more or less the usual time, Wife's car pulled back into our driveway, a little sloppily. A minute or two went by. Then Wife opened the door and came out of the car, stumbling and lurching as if she were drunk. She got up to our stoop, came in the front door, and lurched her way into the living room, where she collapsed on the sofa. Her speech was not very coherent. And when I went over to ask if she was OK, I saw that the palms of her hands were a bloody mess.

So I wiped off her hands—I don't remember seeing a visible wound, or at least there was no fresh blood coming out once I cleaned them off—and asked her what happened. What follows is her story, as I remember it.

Blast from the past: Wife and the Baptists

Did I ever explain how Wife—who started our marriage as a Wiccan—ended up attending a Baptist church? I don't remember if I ever did, but it looks like I didn't. On the other hand, the other day I was looking through some of my old emails, and I found one of my old emails to Marie in which (among other things) I discussed about half of it. At the time I thought I should paste that into here, and then I realized I should go one step further and give you the whole story. Or as much of it as I can remember these many years later.

So this all started in … well, I think it was the early 2000's. Wife started getting terrible migraine headaches. Or rather, she'd always had migraine headaches from time to time, but they were getting worse and more frequent. So she went to her doctor, who ran some tests and finally took images of her head. When the images came back, he informed her that she was suffering from pseudotumor cerebri. This is a condition where some blockage in one of the vessels in her brain stopped the spinal fluid from draining out the way it should. So she was developing a pool of spinal fluid in her brain, that was acting like a brain tumor. It wasn't a real brain tumor, because it wasn't a growth of excess brain tissue. It was just a pool of spinal fluid. But it put pressure on the rest of the brain just like a brain tumor would have done. Hence the name "pseudotumor cerebri."

Great, so now Wife had a diagnosis. Heaven knows she collected diagnoses the way some people collect baseball cards, and now here was one more. So she asked her doctor what could be done about it? 

Her doctor suggested that she put her affairs in order.

Paying Alfred

I wrote you about getting a call from my old college buddy Alfred, who asked me for a couple thousand dollars. It took me a couple of days to come to a decision, but in the end I wrote him a check for $500. 

My analysis of his situation continues to be that there is a lot he isn't saying. As I explained in my last post, the story he gave doesn't work because the timing is wrong: he says he spent a bunch of money looking after his mother, but she died several years ago. What has he been doing since then, that has gotten him into a financial crunch NOW? The first time I asked this, I got an artful non-answer. When I pointed out that he hadn't answered—and also said, Fine, don't tell me, I don't need to know"—he added that yes, there was more to it: his tutoring business had fallen off during the pandemic. I did not bother to remind him that the pandemic was four years ago, so this explanation is as bad as the other. The timing is wrong. So one way or another, he is not telling the whole story. And if it is that important for him to hide parts of the story, those parts must be pretty ugly. I assume that it's probably something like drugs, gambling, or—at the absolute best—skull-cracking financial stupidity.

How did I make my decision? Partly I just sat and mulled. And partly I read Tarot for it. You recall that I started reading Tarot something like three years ago. What's more, even if you think that the cards really are random, there is an advantage for someone like me—who is often afflicted with indecision—to use an external tool like the Tarot to come to closure. Sometimes, after all, any decision is better than no decision. (For a more thorough account of the mechanisms by which divination works—including at least two mechanisms that even the most hardened skeptic would acknowledge—see this article from October 2016 by John Michael Greer.) I won't reproduce pictures for all the cards that I laid out, but I asked a number of questions and the answers seemed pretty consistent.

If you think that reading Tarot is dumb, feel free to skip the rest of this post. (Though there is a little more narrative towards the end.)

Am I become Death?

Back on New Year's Day, I did a Tarot reading for myself for the year. Much of what it told me was unexceptional. My immediate situation was pegged as waiting (8 Wands reversed), exacerbated by indecision (2 Swords). The basis of my situation is that I'm acting like a scholar (Page of Pentacles) by thinking and writing, both here and in my professional blog under my real name. And so on.

Now my Self card was Death. At the time, I read this as advice that I would see major changes in my Self this year, because I have always read that card as "major change." But I wonder if there might not be more going on?

Over on the Patio I just finished a pair of articles which propose that humans thrive best under conditions of adversity, scarcity, and conflict—not peace and plenty. (You can find the first one here, and the second one here.) And last night, after I finished writing and posting the second article, I started to think about it with respect to my own situation. I have enough to eat and drink, and a roof over my head, all without working. I live alone, so I don't have to fight with anyone over the breakfast table. For the most part, except for some writing once or twice a week, there's nothing special that I need to do.

When John B. Calhoun subjected a population of rats to those exact same conditions, the rats died.

And so I began to wonder, Does the Death card have a double meaning for me right now? Yes, of course it generally means "major change." And of course anyone learning the Tarot is always warned not to read it as death simply and straight-up, because that will terrify the person you are reading for. But I start to think that maybe it means something a little more complex, something like this:

How to know your will

I can't believe I never posted this story before. But a quick search proves that I haven't. So here goes.

A couple days ago, I read a remark by John Michael Greer that he made three years ago, in the middle of a discussion about training the will. (I probably read it back then too, but in the moment this discussion was referenced from something more recent.) Anyway, leaving the context aside, what he said was: "You always do act in accordance with your will -- just not always in accordance with your conscious will."

And suddenly I was reminded of a Full Moon ritual put on by Wife and a couple other members of her coven, some 36 or 37 years ago. One of the young men (later ordained as Sun-Bear) drew the lot to serve as Priestess, so the Lady was invoked into him during the Aspect. (For a rough overview of the Full Moon ritual, see this post here. At the ritual I'm describing now, I was not the one to do the invocation.)

"Neopagan disability cult"?

A few days ago I was reading John Michael Greer's latest weekly blog post—plus the comments, which are always valuable—and in replying to one comment he made a passing reference to something he called the "Neopagan disability cult." Someone asked him what he meant, and he explained as follows:

Don't ask a question unless you want the answer

Last month I talked about things that it might be kind of nice to do, but that I wasn't doing because I wasn't really doing anything. One of these was, "I imagine it might be nice to publish the book I've written related to the work I used to do as a day job." As I've explained before (for example, here in some detail) I've written the damned thing, and I've talked to several people about how to publish it. But I've taken no action. And in fact the day before I posted "Becalmed," I had wasted some time by asking the Tarot how it would go if I tried to publish with this or that person. I couldn't make anything of the results.

But you may also remember a little over a year ago when I was still wrestling with whether to find a job, I asked a woman on the Internet (Kimberly Steele) who reads Ogham what her reading said I should do. (And she said no, I shouldn't be looking for a regular job.) Why not ask her again? At least it's a way to delay having to make a decision or take any concrete action, … right? What could go wrong?

Debbie and the paranormal, part 2

Following on from the earlier post by this name (last month), I remember once maybe a couple years ago, when I was trying to decide what to do after losing my job and also wondering if my retirement savings would last for the rest of my life.

At one point I was discussing these questions with Debbie, and she said, "You know, I've got a feeling that you have a lot of years ahead of you yet … and also that you are going to spend a lot of that time writing."

Of course that doesn't necessarily mean that she's right, does it?

Or maybe I'd better get to work. (grumble, grumble) Just saying.