Strength and politics

Blog, written Dec. 18. Posted Jan 15

The Tarot card for today is Strength. In the Mother Peace Deck Strength is a woman unclothed. She is calming a wolf with a child’s toy, petting a white rabbit, many animals are happily surrounding her. The lion is in the background.
She looks strong, happy, able to tame all comers and solve all problems.
In other decks she is usually petting a lion, or beside a lion. Sometimes in a long white dress. Other times in an animal skin, usually a tiger’s. Somehow you know she defeated, killed or overcame the tiger, skinned it and wears it proudly to show her strength. She can do anything.
Strength has always been pictured as a woman since early times. Women bled and did not die. So they were strong. Women’s bellies grew big for no reason and babies came. She lived through the travail of birth. So she was strong. She could work the soil and bring forth food. Keep it preserved all through cold winters. Keep fires going. Nurse and heal the sick, no matter how appalling.
When it was discovered how babies really came into being, she was still had strength to bear this, for a while.
When men wanted to take over the healing arts they had to call her witch and burn her at the stake. That mysterious strength that let her bear the fire, not give up her sisters, and still pass on her knowledge to her sisters kept the survivors going. Drove the persecutors crazy with anger. Sometimes her strength helped her elude her captors.
Her strength walks among us today. In men, women and children as we go about our daily lives, defeat our fears, go places where no man nor woman has ever gone before.
That strength exists in women and men in the armed forces, school teachers, scientists, writers, healers and spiritual leaders of all faiths. Strength is a woman, strong, healthy, sturdy and available to all people. Use that strength wisely to help others. To stay in school when your young and study. Go back to school and learn new skills when you are older. To perform a delicate operation, clean up a city, catch the bad guys, find the secret formula that will save a life.
Use Strength to lose that extra weight, quit smoking. Slow down on the drinking. Get off the drugs. Lead a healthy life. That Strength will help you to write your novel, the poem, compose a masterpiece. It will help the struggle to achieve the impossible when you are tired, lonely, afraid, sick. Strength will come when you ask for it.

My thought of the day is again: Be grateful. Be Satisfied. Live in the NOW. I had to use it one night because events happened that made be loose my focus, my bearings, my strength. I lost sight of Strength.
I’m in a financial jam because of charge cards and am working with attorneys to get them paid. The good news most creditors are reasonable and helpful. A few aren’t. They want the blood in my veins. So my attorney needed more money to pay what they asked. Money that I really don’t have. I was angry, mad, and tried to think what to do. I meditated, then thought, Be grateful for what I have and what had been done, and for what was being tried. Be satisfied for what had been done and will have been done the best they can. NOW is where I am, not the past, not the future, NOW. So I calmed my mind, body and soul to gain strength. I did my meditations, my exercises knowing somehow I would get through this and everything would come out the way it was supposed to. If my creditors were wrong they would pay their own price in their own time. I only had to worry about my responsibilities. I felt better.

The political thought this day is about Wall Street, I’ve been reading “Too Big To Fall”, By Andrew Ross Sorkin, or listening to it. I read his article in Vanity Fair, heard him speak on Charlie Rose.
Why we, The American People did not, nor have not marched on Wall Street, I do not know. Why congress abandoned us for the years this was going on, that was before Omama was president, folks I do not know. Why we let it happen, “WE THE PEOPLE” when all the signs were there and we were too greedy to notice, I do not know. When foreclosures started we blamed the homeowners, never the banks, mortgage leaders.
I guess because it was impossible for us to believe that mortgages given by our own banks had to be divided up and shipped to other countries. Shame on them, shame on us. We never understood the system. If we are a nation that lives on credit and borrowing. That doesn’t’ mean just us, the home buyer, the credit card user, the pay check hourly worker. It means, banks, Wall Street, etc. That is frightening. That there is only so much money and we have used it up.
Watch the commercials. Loan ads, investment ads, are increasing. It looks the big boys in the investment houses on Wall Street are starting up again.
And health care. I do not understand those in congress who do not want a National Health Care system. I do not understand the opponents calling it socialism.
Congress has the best health care in the country. We pay for it with our taxes. A national health care system, socialism. Works for them.
The armed forces has a national health care system, socialism. They also have a socials system for going back to school. We pay for it. Join the Armed Forces and get a college degree. Works for them.
The school system paid for with our taxes is socialism. I think it works better than we are told. We have full collages and high schools. We need to increase the help to see if that every child has as much education as they can use, support or need.
I don’t object to any of these. I think congress, armed forces, teachers, all government workers work hard and deserve health care. I don’t mind my taxes paying for these items. I do object to it going to health care for all Americans, paid for with our taxes, at a low rate.
What I don’t understand is why those members in congress who call giving the American people health care; socialism, and unconstitutional and too expensive, don’t want us to have what they have.
We work hard and deserve good health care. But companies that offer insurance make it so expensive, and put so many restrictions on doctors. They have lists, procedures, and pay so little and we pay a huge amount for our insurance that it is unobtainable for a great deal of people.
If your company goes bankrupt and your insurance is canceled you can’t always afford Cobra. Some members of congress don’t care. I wonder how many insurance companies contribute to campaigns. I’m very angry at “the loyal opposition” about their conduct, the tea parties, the lies.

Here is my poem of today, I wrote this for a poetry and art expression at 308. Have since corrected mistakes, changed the poem and written two other solstice poems. I will include them in another blog.
Oh. I paid for the book Too Big to Fall, by Sorbin. I recommend you buy it or get it from I Tunes on your I pod and listen. It is an amazing book. There also has been a series on PBS about the crash on Wall Street and Charlie Rose has interviewed several authors who have written and studies this event. Mother Jones lates Issue has asome good articles also.
WINTER SOLSTICE
Winter Solstice
I stand beside the stream at Winter Solstice. My hands shiver as I hold a cardboard box. I place it on frozen grass that crackles as it bends with the weight. Beside this stream in midsummer we made love on the short night of Summer Solstice. You and I lying on the soft green bank as the water gurgled by. Fish glided beside us. Frogs croaked. Dragon flies spun up and down like medivacs hovering to land amid the Insects buzz. Birds called as they flew from nest to ground gathering food for the next generation wiggling in gyrated featureless blobs with open mouths in twig woven nests. Creepy crawlers run over our naked bodies. Star like floodlights illumine our arena of desire. We’re the new stage production, so very young and bright. I share my passion with the moon as we become one on the day the ancients say we have fully left the labyrinth and must think of returning.

Now in Winter Solstice I stand in snow amid brown and brittle grass. Cold hands sunk into pockets. Breath blows out in puffs of smoke that surrounds me as if I were the old man of winter preparing to leave us in the labyrinth. The stream still gurgles slow as a flowing icicle. Struggling toward a future of iced love frozen in time. I throw a rock into the frigid water. Rings form, streaking out across the steam like the rings squeezing my heart into petrified rock, as circles under my eyes reflect the cavern where the water rushes. I bend to ground and pick up the cardboard box, hold it against my warm body, one last time. My hands shake and quiver as I rip it open, losing all reverence.

I walk to the stream and face the cold moon of Solstice, I hold up the box. An offering to the warmth of love. To Spirit. I cast your ashes into the moving stream. I scatter rose petals from my pocket into the moving water. I speak only the words from Amy Lowell’s poem, “Patterns,” as your eulogy. I shout to the wind, the river, the Gods and Goddess’s, words from the poem, “In a Pattern Called A War.” Then smile as I press my hand against my now round belly.

I will baptize your child with water from our stream next Midsummer. Together he and I will place a Yule Wreath at Winter Solstice. The longest night for us all.

This is a rewrite, I think I’ve posted before, I have the next three in the series outlined. Will Published them in next blog.