Today is the Winter Solstice. The sun sets here at 5:03 p.m., and after that, the daylight will slowly begin to last a little longer.
In ancient cultures, this day marked the death and rebirth of the Sun; it's always been a time of festivals, bacchanalias, and ritual. Some of the most fascinating old monuments were built around the Solstice, such as Stonehenge.
Often on the Solstice, I do a tarot reading at tarot.com, just for the fun of it. I don't take these things seriously, but sometimes they give me something to think about.
Today's reading was rather eye-opening:
There are some major cards in this reading - The Hermit, The Devil, The Sun, The Emperor, and The Empress in particular.
The Hermit is familiar to me - I draw that card a lot - but I don't recall ever drawing The Devil and certainly not in conjunction with other major cards. I don't think I've ever drawn The Emperor and The Empress in the same spread, either.
The Empress card indicates there is someone in my life - or someone coming into my life - whom I should strive to emulate, while The Emperor card indicates that someone with power and influence may soon be interested in my abilities.
The Devil, however, throws a big rocky rock into the pond of my life. This card demands raw energy and suggests drastic change. Some force will both attract and repel me at the same time. This card indicates a creative and chaotic time, provided I have the courage to move forward.
The Sun card indicates I can fulfill a dream, maybe even change my world.
Given the cards thrown here, it looks like forward movement is going to require some strength on my part to withstand the forces that want to hold me back.
The Hermit in the position of Higher Power is particularly important, for it indicates I'm trying to wean myself of addictions and distractions. Oddly, I have already begun this, most especially by trying to rid myself of my video game addiction. I've told all of my fellowships I will no longer be playing after the first of the year. I am working to set aside something that part of me holds dear and another part kind of loathes because it is non-productive.
The other cards support this view that I am in a time of change, but one where I will need downtime to recharge before I hustle back into the game. It looks a bit like a battle of three steps forward, two steps back, but that means that I will eventually reach a goal.
I'm just not sure what goal it is I am going for, though I think I may have an idea.
We'll see if the Solstice brings me a bunch of brighter tomorrows.
Happy Solstice to all!
P.S. If any of you are tarot readers and want to chime in on what you see above, feel free!
I encourage you to visit other participants in Sunday Stealing posts and leave a comment. Cheers to all us thieves who love memes, however we come by them.
Sam the Snowman from Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, assists me with a Christmas carol.
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| From 2007. |
Addicted. It's an appropriate word for the way I've felt most of the weekend.
It rained, and my internet first became spotty, then died only to occasionally revive itself.
I couldn't blog, couldn't play video games, couldn't look up answers to questions. Oh, some of it I did on my phone, but I have a very low data usage plan, so I couldn't spend a lot of time on that doing things I'd otherwise do with the wi-fi.
There went my plans to watch the new Louise Penny series, Three Pines, on Amazon. No streaming without the Internet.
So too my plans to write blog posts in advance, although the main thing that stopped me there was anxiety and nerves. I could have written the posts in MS Word and saved them to cut and paste later, if I'd really been desperate.
Mostly it was knowing I couldn't do things that made me want to do them.
Strange how that works, eh?
We still have a landline, and that also went dead. Old fashioned, I know, but my husband had to have one for work - it was in his contract - and the landline number is the one on his business cards, still. So, we keep it, and many things are tied to it.
I had medicine called in for refills, so I couldn't get the call from my pharmacy to know when to pick things up because it's tied to the landline. I couldn't look it up online, either, to see if it was ready.
Some online shopping awaited my attention too - a pickup order for Sam's Club, a little something I thought about for my husband (and no longer remember because I didn't write it down and couldn't order it the moment I thought of it).
The internet has us all tied to a way of life that is very different than it was 25 years ago. It's amazing how much it has changed the way we function and operate.
Being old, I knew how to entertain myself - there's always house cleaning and a book - but still, I noticed the lack of internet in my routine.
I felt off kilter. It also frustrated me to think I'm so dependent upon a computer and access to the outside world.
It really is a time suck, and my husband, who seldom is online, is probably far better off than I am, addicted as I am to my online reading and adventures.
Thank heavens it's fixed. Now if I could only get a fiber line and stop using DSL.
(I tried to visit Saturday 9 and Sunday Stealing blogs during the small windows when I had service. If I didn't get around to you, I'm sorry!)
I encourage you to visit other participants in Sunday Stealing posts and leave a comment. Cheers to all us thieves who love memes, however we come by them.
I found this amusing, but also sad. Subscriptions to newspapers are dying - we're dinosaurs, my husband and me, who subscribe still to the print editions.
But without the journalists watching the town, ensuring the local government doesn't slide its way into fascism or some other unwanted form of governing, who will keep the officials on their toes? Citizen journalists with blogs?
The local officials aren't scared of citizen journalists with blogs. They aren't scared by online newspapers, either. Online copy is ephemeral. It can be easily changed, removed, deleted. It's easy to say it didn't happen, even if the online article states it did.
Print, though - that's permanent. When the print articles say something happened, it happened.
I am part of the local news media, even though I do not write as much as I did. My medium now is an online one, where I write government stories. The print paper that I used to write for still exists but does little in the way of real journalism. There are no hard-hitting news stories there, no small bomb-drops of information that make the public take note.
The online paper is free; the print paper is also online but behind a paywall. I don't know how many digital subscribers it has. The online paper I write for says it sometimes gets 20,000 hits on an article. Other times, not so much.
My work in the online paper sometimes aggravates the local officials because I pull no punches. I don't sugar coat, but neither do I offer opinion. I simply state what happened at a meeting. If someone says something outlandish that I think the public needs to know about, I report it. If the local officials are doing things that I think the public needs to know about, I report it. I don't exaggerate or minimize; I leave it to the reader to decide if this issue is important or not.
Most of my long-time readers know if I report on something, I think it is important and something they should know about.
I am the one who watches the local officials for Freedom of Information Act violations; the one who questions the number of closed sessions they take, the information that comes out of those sessions, and any number of other things. Even when I was writing for the print paper, many times I questioned but the public never knew I was making inquiries, protecting their interests to the best of my ability.
As best I can tell, the less drama for the print paper, the better.
My inquiries with government officials are taken seriously, in part because I've been doing it for so long, but not as seriously as they once were (or so it seems).
Without a good newspaper, a community suffers from lack of information. As the comic strip notes, where do the people who fuss about things on social media sites actually get their information? From local news reporters, whether that's print or TV media.
Or an online community journalist.
Subscribe to a paper, even if it's digital. It supports democracy, and we all know that needs all the help it can get.
*Edited
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| The angel with the wings growing dark. |
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| The angel with her wings growing light. |
The tree went up yesterday. You can also see we hung our stockings with care by the fireplace.
My husband and I agree on most things about what we place on the tree. It must have multi-colored lights, the tinsel that is stringy and that sticks to you when you walk by the tree, and a few special ornaments. He likes an angel on top.
Now to get the presents wrapped!
I encourage you to visit other participants in Sunday Stealing posts and leave a comment. Cheers to all us thieves who love memes, however we come by them.
