December 2nd

December 2nd - Space / Blackbird

In preparation for our workshop SOLSTICE PREP: Preparing for the Light, I'm exploring the Elemental Meditation cards we will be using by Robert Hensley Nature Reconnect -- and you'll get to take home for your Winter Solstice practice!

Today's card draw:

🐦‍⬛ Blackbird - magic & dreaming

🐦‍⬛ with Space - Be present to your place in the Universe, avoid getting lost in dreaming

Observations:

🐦‍⬛ Today I started reading Rebecca Solnit's 2004 book "Hope in the Darkness." It begins like this, and I think speaks to present-moment living while imagining the future:

🐦‍⬛ Page 1:

"On January 18, 1915, six months into the First World War, as all Europe was convulsed by killing and dying, Virginia Wolf wrote in her journal, 'The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think.' Dark, she seems to be saying, as in inscrutable, not terrible. We often mistake one for the other. Or we transform the future's unknowability into something certain, the fulfillment of all our dread, the place beyond which there is no way forward. But again and again, far stranger things happen than the end of the world."

🐦‍⬛ Page 4:

"Causes and effects assume history marches forward, but history is not any army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one person inspires a movement, or her words do decades later; sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do; sometimes those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same ideal and change comes up on us like a change of weather. All that these transformations have in common is that they begin in the imagination, in hope. To hope is to gamble. It's to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk."

🐦‍⬛ Page 5:

"I say all this to you because hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. I say this because hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope. At the beginning of his massive 1930s treatise on hope, the German philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote, 'The work of this emotion requires people who throw themselves actively into what is becoming, to which they themselves belong.' To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable."

What shoves you out the door with your ax of hope each morning?