My Christmas Sock

 Earthrise on the Moon - a shot taken by Bill Anders

of the Apollo 8 crew on December 24, 1968

photo credit: NASA

I don’t get a stocking, I get a sock. Why? Because Christmas to me is a holiday, but not all that religious. My regard for religions – all of them – have changed over the years.

Most of all I think of religion as a repository for the customs and lessons humans have accumulated. That’s why they all seem to have encoded in them similar lessons about death and grieving. Not the rites or rituals…I mean the fact that people seem to go through such metamorphic changes in the year after someone important to them passes on. At a year, something shifts. Nearly every religion has something about this cycle in its teachings.

It’s there because whether or not you believe in God, religion reflects – at least in part – what we have learned about human life.

Last year, my holiday sock came all unraveled. I was done a dirty deed by someone and wept all the way to early spring – just in time to hear that my mother was going to die of cancer, which she did about three weeks later.

Two months after that, while sitting at a red light in beastly hot weather, I became involved in a car accident. It was my (recently) late mother’s birthday – which as I put it to my brother suggested that even though she had passed, she still had the capacity to be a pain in the neck. And the very (very) low back.

He laughed. He said it was the first time he had laughed since she had been diagnosed. Ours is an odd family – much drama, little closeness. I learned astrology to teach me what my family didn’t …or maybe couldn’t…be bothered to impart.

All this comes back to me now in these few days after at Lunar Eclipse at the “critical” degree 29 of Gemini.

In this past week, I could cite some really interesting examples of this eclipse at work, which is really what I meant to blog about.

Two members of my family – my brother and my cousin – both had epiphanies about how to communicate better. As we talked about it, I could feel the light growing in their hearts as they recognized not only how to be better understood by others, but how to feel heard, and how to be heard in a way which would lead to being better appreciated by the important people in their lives.

That’s very Gemini. Gemini is thought and choice – thus how we choose to express ourselves so that we not only convey our thoughts well, but are thought of well enough that we get where we thought we were originally choosing to go!

Eclipses are universal things. So it stands to reason that the lessons they teach are global – how my brother speaks. How my cousin regards her sense of priority and what her responsibilities are. And aren’t! No one is in charge of everything. We all only have to do our part as well as we can.

Then came the more personal moments. I had a conversation this past Monday night – as the eclipse was starting to occur – with a friend I trust enough to explore uncomfortable ideas with.

It all turned out fine. He even texted me on Tuesday to express his happiness that we had shared on a subject he knew was hard for me.

Sometimes all we need to know is that someone really is safe. That we really can talk about something. That it may not just turn out fine, but things could be better because we went over that line not with someone else, but with ourselves.

Then I put up my post on Senator Mitch McConnell. It promptly drew critique not on the astrology as presented, but on the civics side (my having used an incorrect title for Senator McConnell) and apparently just for good measure, the astrology I could have done which this particular astrologer would have done.

For those of you who think I’m some sort of chiseled-out-of-granite kind of girl, I sometimes am, but mostly am not. It also bugs the holy tar out of me when those who can’t be bothered to run a blog themselves complain. (Like, grrrrr.)

Yes, he wrote me later when he realized I had resented getting hit with an email cattle prod. He said he is sorry, but that had already brought out the notice...a version of which is now sitting in the blog sidebar...about how I’m pretty darn sure I really need to be taking the bulk of my limited functional time and devoting it to something which can actually pay the bills. That’s Gemini as ‘thinking it over’ and ‘making decisions’ and – important to all Gemini processes – priorities. 

I’ve heard from a couple of people since the announcement went up. But in the end I’m not sure but that I may have been right in what I said….for a lot of reasons.

I spend a lot of time exhorting all of you to be who you have the capacity to be. I believe in that, and I believe in that.

Being an astrologer is an interest of mine, but it’s not my life-long passion. My life passion has been to become a fantasy writer. No, my model was not JK Rowlings – it was JRR Tolkien. Actually, I knew what I wanted to be when I was 7 (a quarter of a Saturn cycle old)…and Lord of the Rings wasn’t even out yet. So my inspiration? I think it was Disney’s Fantasia – the original one. That and all the Oz books by L. Frank Baum (there are a whole bunch of them in case you don’t know).

Tolkien came along when I was in my teens. For the record, I had a hard time getting into Lord of the Rings…that Chapter Three filled with history put me to sleep. Since everyone said the book was so good though, I decided to skip that and go on reading. By 200 pages later I understood why you needed to know all that history and went back to read it.

Those of you who have had Peter Jackson to help you out here with the films – you’re lucky. Actually, my dad almost made Lord of the Rings as a film…he was approached by director Ralph Bakshi, who had a demo reel I remember watching with utter awe and amazement. It was mostly in Rotoscope, a process Hollywood doesn’t use any more…and no, it’s not what finally got released. What I saw was very eerie and very wonderful - and I was horrified when Ralph and my father snarled at each other like two lions on the veldt and went their separate ways. (No, I’m not going to tell you what got said. It’s Christmas, after all!)

In the end however…that’s all okay. I think Peter Jackson came to the project just as the technology of motion pictures had gotten to the right place to make the film.

Those films, by the by, were each released at Mercury stations. Look at the box office – it’s an interesting commentary on astrological timing.

Anyway…I’m still iffy about what’s going to happen next. Your closing week of December and January are already blogged and busy – not to worry about that. And maybe once the book is published I’ll have more time to blog – who knows.

Bottom line, I really want to have a chance to be the person I want to be in this life too. Preferably before it’s all over. I don’t want to be one of those authors who is only known after they die. It’s not the fame – it’s the fun. And it’s not the money, though I want to be able to take care of myself, eat properly and sleep at night, sure.

There’s a lot of that going around, yes. But it’s because this is a time for a lot of us to change. I’m not unique – I’m one of you.

If I make a lot of money, you may be assured I will use a goodly portion of same to help others. In my 56-plus years I’ve seen more than a few gaps which need filling and whole groups of people who deserve help. That’s what I’d focus on.

Okay, and maybe a sequel to the fantasy.

But we’ll have to see what happens. Rest assured, those of you who have written me – we will be in touch. Those of you who want to write me, the email is in the sidebar – be in touch.

And for those of you who don’t care one way or another, that’s okay too.

So! Now I’m going to stuff a sock (my Christmas sock) in it and move on, wishing you all a very peaceful and happy Christmas, Kwanza…or even a belated Hanukkah. I hope the wax came off the menorah without a hassle.

Jingle bells all around, I say!

Boots Hart, CAP