By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
I confess to not having paid attention to the news lately, although it’s hard to miss our national preoccupation with “enemies” — Snowden, Tsarnaev, Zimmerman — when their pictures grace the covers of magazines and front pages of newspapers, pushing our paranoia buttons and making us long for sane conversation. We can hardly deny that this has been called the “summer of hate” for good reason, but I have been otherwise occupied with life matters, or, as my son commented recently, “How did things go from crawling like molasses to speeding like a moving train in just a matter of weeks?”
A good question, and poised on Mercury’s welcome change of direction, even more direct trajectory is just ahead (to which I add my profound relief: this has been one of the most difficult and frustrating personal retros in my recent memory).
I’m just back from two days assisting an elderly cousin winnow down a lifetime collection of belongings as he prepares to move from the 4000 square foot home he’d built in the ’60s to a small condo in a retirement village. Very little of the household has changed since his wife, a dear spiritual mentor, passed two years ago after a protracted illness, so I spent time throwing away old food from the pantry, going through her copious stores of vitamins and supplements identifying usefulness, and loading volumes into boxes from one of the most complete metaphysical libraries I’ve had the pleasure to plunder.
It was both poignant and bittersweet as she was not there, but, of course, her energy was still palpable in all the important ways, so we talked of her as if she were present, enjoyed one another’s company, and made a dent in an otherwise overwhelming project. Still, I drove away aware that it was a solemn goodbye to one of the last remaining family homesteads dear to my clan.