Willowmist's Wanderings

How can we expect children to learn courtesy when grownups have so much trouble locating their inside voices?  Listen, it’s bad enough that you feel the need to talk all the way through your own kid’s karate class, but could you at least try not to compete in volume with the sensei?  Or you could just shut the hell up.  I would like that.  At least stop for a breath occasionally so that the rest of us may rest our weary ears.

You know what else I’m tired of?  Road rage.  So, people get angry sitting in traffic and that excuses them from using the good judgement granted to the human species?  Like we aren’t all stuck in traffic together?  Because you’re angry you get to lash out violently at strangers and the rest of us are supposed to meekly stand out of the way of your enormous ego and temper?  If that isn’t a textbook case of “GET OVER YOURSELF,” I don’t know what is.  Look, I’ve been known to honk my horn when someone cuts me off, and I’ll even confess to cursing crassly at people who block my driveway while I’m obviously trying to back out of it.  People who don’t know how to merge make me a little crazy.  But I can’t imagine who you think you are to pick fights with people in traffic because you’re miffed that you have to share the road with everyone else who wants to get home in the evening.  Clearly you don’t care how you look to others, but if you did care, I would tell you that, to the disinterested, dispassionate observer — those of us who try to control our over-indulgent emotional outbursts — you look ridiculous.  You look like a spoiled toddler pounding his fists on the pavement because he doesn’t want to take a nap.

Happy May 19 everyone.

Life has loveliness to sell,
All beautiful and splendid things;
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
Soaring fire that sways and sings,
And children's faces looking up,
Holding wonder like a cup.

Life has loveliness to sell;
Music like a curve of gold,
Scent of pine trees in the rain,
Eyes that love you, arms that hold,
And, for the Spirit's still delight,
Holy thoughts that star the night.

Give all you have for loveliness;
Buy it, and never count the cost!
For one white, singing hour of peace
Count many a year of strife well lost;
And for a breath of ecstasy,
Give all you have been, or could be.

When I have ceased to break my wings
 Against the faultiness of things,
 And learned that compromises wait
 Behind each hardly opened gate,
 When I can look Life in the eyes,
 Grown calm and very coldly wise,
 Life will have given me the Truth,
 And taken in exchange--my youth.

• I must have passed the crest a while ago
  And now I am going down—
  Strange to have crossed the crest and not to know,
  But the brambles were always catching the hem of my gown.
  
  All the morning I thought how proud I should be
  To stand there straight as a queen,
  Wrapped in the wind and the sun with the world under me—
  But the air was dull, there was little I could have seen.
  
  It was nearly level along the beaten track
  And the brambles caught in my gown—
  But it’s no use now to think of turning back,
  The rest of the way will be only going down.

Yes, that is a biblical reference in a Pagan blog. Deal with it.  I can use a reference to too much rain in the same way that someone might say, “open sesame,” without knowing anything much about Ali Baba and his forty thieves or A Thousand and One Nights.

The reference is to a godforsaken land in which the rain falls without impunity for days and days and days and still no one knows how to drive in it.  I think it rains so much in Philadelphia because the Fates can’t believe how strangely it makes people behave here. I imagine mischiveous spirits up in the sky arguing over whether THIS time Philadlephians will just put their wipers on and not slow down to a crawl because mere water is falling from the sky. Surely by now they are familiar with rain and, surely by now they will have learned how to deal with it. Nope. Each time it rains around here everyone suddenly turns into Chicken Little and the roads become gnarled with idiots who don’t understand the purpose of the treads on their tires. We’ve become sport to bored rain spirits until we figure out how to drive in the rain in Philadelphia. Please people — it’s water and falls from the sky a lot. LEARN!

I, like many of my American allies, am wondering who President Obama will choose for the Supreme Court. I find it amusing that the conservatives of the nation are already taking exception to the President’s stated requirements for his candidate. Because a judge should never be sympathetic. What if his or her sympathies blind him or her to the needs of the law? Maybe I shouldnt’ be amused. Maybe this is the problem that divides us as a people. The conservatives have misunderstood the meaning of the word sympathetic.

The number one definition of sympathetic, according to Merriam-Webster, is “existing or operating through an affinity, interdependence, or mutual association.”

Doesn’t that speak to the human condition?  Shouldn’t someone sitting in judgement of society remember that he or she is part of that society?  Mitakye Oyasin.  It doesn’t mean, in this context, that a judge would be swayed by a sympathy to gay rights or right to life or feminism.  It doesn’t mean softhearted or stupid.

Happy Cinco de Mayo everyone.