Recap:Last time, our storyteller shared her youthful encounters with bureaucracies. She wrote of the Forest Circus, where she'd been ordered to slaughter thousands of innocent seedlings. The experience compromised her ethically and rendered her an insubordinate thief.
She relapsed ten years later by taking a job with the Motor Vehicles Division. There, she was required to send handicapped drivers to the doctor to be recertified as 'still permanently disabled' in order to renew their wheelchair license plates. She left public service compromised, an insubordinate liar.
This is the first of what will be three posts about bureaucracy and its vagaries. In broad strokes, it is a tragicomic farce in four acts (four reports from hell), plus the conclusions I have at last been able to draw from it all now that I'm a geezer with the luxury of time for retrospection.
Wild bird populations in North America are a fraction of what they were in the middle of the 20th century. Many species face extinction. A significant factor in the demise of wild birds are domestic cats. Please, please, please keep your cats inside.
Lughnasadh (loo-na-sa) is one of three pagan harvest festivals that stretch from late summer to the end of the vegetal cycle at Samhain (sow-en, Halloween). Lughnasadh celebrates the first harvest early in August; Imbolc, at the autumnal equinox is the second; and the last is at Samhain, on November Eve, after which the world dies back for the winter.
Details. The all-important details. Some say the devil hides there, in minutiae easily dismissed as inconsequential and beneath notice. Aspects of the whole so small as to escape importance.
I was righteously pleased with my clever box labeling, and my label that got a lot of laughs from a lot of people for a lot of years. I was a young adult packing to move out of my college dorm room, and was beginning to accumulate things. My things. The things that would express my adult self and
I recently killed the first two paper coffee cups I've killed in over a decade. My community service commitment obliged me to attend several days of training in a seedy desert casino a couple of hours north and west of here.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder. If the Spring Equinox is the subtle stirring of an initial thaw, Beltane (May Day or May Eve) is a luscious, tumescent awakening. Beltane cherishes the power of the Sun as it warms the Earth into Her season of fertility. This is no fleeting, adolescent crush. This is that heart-pounding, ecstatic moment you first find true love; the moment you know this is The One (capital T, capital O); the moment the flirtation quickens and grows into the kind of life-affirming love you can trust enough to build your life around. Love that we all share with Goddess and God in this season of reincarnation and generation; a tidal pull far too delicious and compelling to resist. This is a time for lovers in the most Sacred sense.
Recap:
Last time, our storyteller shared her youthful encounters with bureaucracies. She wrote of the Forest Circus, where she'd been ordered to slaughter thousands of innocent seedlings. The experience compromised her ethically and rendered her an insubordinate thief.