Here comes Ostara.

Deposit Photos

As alert hearth/myth readers know, I've been working for the New Mexico legislature as a legal proofreader for the past couple of months. Our state legislature meets over the winter, for 60 days in odd-numbered years and 30 days in even-numbered years. So this was a 60-day session. It started the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in January and went for 60 days straight -- no lunch hours, no weekends, no holidays -- and ended yesterday at noon.

So yesterday afternoon, I emerged from the fog of my hardcore working winter into daylight to discover -- well, to be honest, it still looked like winter out there. Folks in other parts of the country, I know, are enjoying blooming things, but here? Not yet. In fact, I awoke Friday to snow covering the fabulous wall o' windows. Drove to the office wearing my winter gear, including boots -- which were superfluous by the time I left work because all the snow had disappeared. Poof, gone! Evaporation is definitely a thing in the arid Southwest.

Regardless, I know it is nearly Ostara because my calendar tells me so. Tomorrow, in fact, is the equinox -- vernal in the Northern Hemisphere, autumnal in the Southern -- at 3:24pm Mountain Daylight Time. (That's 5:24pm EDT. If you live somewhere else, ask Mama Google.) 

Thanks to the paying job, spring kinda sneaked up on me this year. I managed to think ahead last weekend to buy eggs for coloring, but I realized this afternoon that I needed to boil them today so I can dye them tomorrow. That has now been done. (Just as last year, I plan to dye an egg for justice for Ukraine.) I intended to clean the house today -- it is in desperate need of it, as I decided in January that I could let everything slide 'til session was over -- but that red-and-green afghan is still sitting there, waiting for me to finish reknitting it, so that's another priority. I don't want to still be working on it when the summer solstice rolls around.

The next few weeks will be anything but restful. I do have a short vacation planned for this week, and a longer one coming up next month. But it almost feels like Real Life has been waiting with bated breath for me to emerge from hibernation so it could pounce. Bottom line: The next couple of months won't be terribly restful. But at least the days will be longer.

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One more thing before I stop: This week's episode of The Problem with Jon Stewart on Apple TV+ is all about inflation. Stewart made a connection that I came close to last week, but I didn't connect all the dots: Whenever the economy is threatened, the first solution the powers-that-be always reach for -- always, always, always -- is the one that sticks it to the little guy. When the economy crashed in 2008? The big banks got bailed out, but there was zero relief for people who lost their homes. This year, when we're at full employment, yet inflation continues to climb? Well, that's because the politicians handed regular Americans too much stimulus money -- so now, somewhere between two and ten million regular Americans simply have to lose their jobs. 

That's just the price we have to pay, right? We sure don't want to force corporations to make less money, even though they've been raking in record profits, and lots of them are still using the pandemic and supply-chain problems as justification to raise their prices. (One recent study dubs this "excuseflation".)

Here's a clip from the show of Stewart interviewing former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Highlights for me: Stewart's face (at 1:32) when Summers tries to buddy up with him ("those like you and me, who are very fortunate"), and Summers' frown of incomprehension (at around 2:27) when Stewart suggests that maybe giving bailouts to the bankers in 2009 actually hurt the recovery. And it was at 4:24, when Summers said it's not tenable to suggest that corporations have suddenly become greedy, that I wanted to wipe the smirk off his face. It ain't sudden, Larry.

Daily Kos has a recap of the interview here.

Apple TV+, which airs Stewart's show, classifies it as a comedy. I guess that's on the theory that if you can't laugh about this stuff, you'll cry.

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These moments of exhausted blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Blessed Ostara! Happy spring!

Springing forward with intentions of justice.

Yurumi | Deposit Photos

Happy spring! The vernal equinox occurred at 9:33 a.m. Mountain Daylight Time today. It was at 11:33 a.m for those of you on the East Coast, and, uh, 4:33 p.m. for -- no, wait, I'm wrong. It happened at 3:33 p.m. in Western Europe; y'all don't switch to Daylight Time 'til next Sunday.

This business of springing forward and falling back seems to be getting more unpopular every year. The U.S. Senate actually passed a bill last week -- the Senate! passed a bill! -- to keep Daylight Time all year round. It turns out that the vote was a parliamentary maneuver engineered by Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) and Kyrsten Sinema (D in name only-Arizona), and that nobody objected because they had more important things on their minds -- like, for instance, Ukraine. Regardless, it now goes to the House of Representatives, where it may not even make it to the floor for a vote. 

The sudden nod to year-round Daylight Time was met with the usual grumbling about how, if we're going to stop messing with the clocks, it would be smarter to stick with Standard Time because reasons. Most of the arguments seem to center around little kids waiting for buses in the dark on winter mornings. (I saw one guy in a comment section who seemed aghast that kids in Alaska would lose more morning daylight. Apparently he was unaware that Alaskan kids already go to school in the dark -- and come home in the dark, too.)

Anyway, here's the point I'm ambling toward: As today is the spring equinox, it's also Ostara for many Pagans. I've blogged a few times about the Pagan observance of the holiday, but I don't know whether I've ever explained my own practice (other than to say it looks a lot like Easter but without the guy on the cross).

This year, I attended an online ritual conducted by the CUUPS chapter in Albuquerque. Our magical working was to set intentions for the next few months. We wrote our intentions on a piece of paper, made it into the shape of a kite, decorated it, and wafted it through the air. It was fun. I have my kite pinned to the corkboard above my desk. 

But one thing I've learned about intentions is that they're easy to set and forget. For a magical working to take, you need to do more than just write down your goal; you need to do what you can to manifest that goal in the physical world, as well. And even then, sometimes it doesn't work. Magic doesn't make a thing 100 percent certain -- it only increases the odds that it will happen. But the nudge can tip the odds in your favor, particularly if you follow up with action in the physical world.

Lynne Cantwell 2022

So just to reinforce my intentions, I colored some eggs this morning and marked some of them with symbols to represent what I hope to do. While I went through the process, I mentally reviewed my plans for getting each one done. 

I took special care with one egg -- the one at the right side of the front row. It's blue on top and yellow on bottom, and my intention for that one is this: justice for Ukraine.

Why justice and not peace? I think we're beyond that now. Vladimir Putin is a madman who invaded Ukraine unprovoked. I don't think he has any intention of agreeing to the sort of compromise that would be necessary for true, lasting peace. Ukraine needs for the Russian troops to leave, yes, but Russia also needs to be made to understand that it cannot invade another country again. Ever. 

And once the Russian troops have gone home, Ukraine will need to be rebuilt. 

So: justice first, and soon. Then we can all work for peace.

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These moments of bloggy intentions have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Get vaxxed!

Now commencing: Retirement 2.0.

Yurumi | DepositPhotos.com

I'm sure you've heard the word by now: This past weekend was the spring equinox in the Northern Hemisphere, also known as Ostara. We are now officially out of the dark half of the year that started in September at Mabon; the Oak King has vanquished the Holly King, if that's the Pagan mythos you follow, and will reign for the next six months.* 

Regardless of your spiritual bent, though, for everybody north of the equator, the hours of sunlight will keep increasing until the summer solstice -- and unlike in the days just after the winter solstice, the increased daylight is more obvious now. This is the season for planting seeds, both physical and spiritual/mystical, in the hope that they will bear fruit come harvest time in the fall.

So it seemed fitting to me that the temp job I've been working since the beginning of November ended at noon on Saturday, the day of balance. Having labored for the Man during the darkest part of the year, I am ready to take a significant amount of time off to rest. I'm calling it Retirement 2.0.

Oddly, I now find myself experiencing some of the doubts that keep people in their later working years from retiring at all. 

In the last few years leading up to my retirement from the law firm, I was driven so hard by my need to get out of the job and get out of DC that I was in "by any means necessary" mode. It didn't matter to me how much I had in my 401(k) or how I was going to fill the endless amounts of time I'd have without a job to show up for; I had a plan to execute to get to Santa Fe, the pool of money I had would work if I got a part-time job, and the rest would sort itself out.

So here I am, almost eight months post-retirement. The move has been executed; the part-time job I'd envisioned as being a few hours of work per week throughout the year got slammed into a few intense months; and now I'm out the other side, shell-shocked but standing, blinking, in the sunlight.

In retrospect, I think I may have jumped into the part-time job too soon. I got out here at the tail end of July and started training for the legislative proofreading gig on November 1. I had only three months to decompress before I started working again, and these past two months have been particularly intense: seven days a week, nine hours a day on weekdays and slightly shorter hours on weekends, and no breaks during the day. By the halfway mark, it had stopped being fun. In the final two weeks, I resorted to adding stickers left over from my retirement planner to the wall calendar to help me mark the days 'til the end of session.

Still, the money was good. And that's the lure, isn't it? You show up for the job and in return the company deposits money into your bank account every couple of weeks. What happens when you lose that security blanket?

Not to mention how much people invest of their self-image in the work they do. I thought I'd escaped that mental pitfall; I was always very clear that I wasn't a legal secretary -- rather, I worked as a legal secretary. For the past few months I've worked as a legal proofreader. But now I'm...not working. 

Oh, I'm still an author and editor, but I've done nothing with either of those since NaNoWriMo ended in November. I have the first draft of the NaNo novel to edit and publish (still aiming for Beltane!). That will be my CampNaNo goal for April.

By May, I hope, I'll be vaccinated, and all the things that have been closed since I got here (the performing arts theater a block away, the bookstore and coffee shop across the street) will have reopened. 

For now, though, I'm going to treat myself to a soak in a thermal pool and the luxury of not setting an alarm. After that, I guess I'll let things sort themselves out.

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* In some Pagan traditions, the Oak King and the Holly King trade off at the summer and winter solstices. From the standpoint of the annual cycle of sunlight, that makes more sense -- but in terms of the growing season, it makes more sense to put the handoff at the equinoxes. And lots of Pagans don't incorporate the myth into their traditions at all. 

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These moments of balanced blogginess (and only a day late!) have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Keep masking up and social distancing! We're gonna beat this thing together!

Happy red-tailed spring!

Tomorrow is the spring equinox in the Northern Hemisphere, and it's also the day many Pagans observe Ostara.

I don't plan to be awake at 6:28 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time to welcome in spring on the dot. But we will be coloring eggs (I bought a set of dyes with glitter this year -- it'll be a glorious mess!) and munching on chocolate bunnies. (Eggs and bunnies are ancient symbols of fertility that the early Christian church co-opted to encourage pagans to convert, but I digress.)

Usually, here in DC, we welcome spring with daffodils and blooming trees -- pink magnolias and cherry blossoms. This year, however, we had a ridiculously warm February that sped up the blooming schedule, followed last week by a winter storm that featured snow, sleet, and freezing rain. That storm, together with too many nights in the 20s, put paid to the pink magnolias, as well as about half of the blossoms on the celebrated cherry trees that ring the Tidal Basin. We'll still have trees with flowers this year, but it won't be as pretty as usual.

skeeze | Pixabay

So I'm pinning my hopes for this spring on a different herald: the red-tailed hawk that I saw from our dining room window this morning. He (or she -- there's not much difference in their coloring) looked a lot like the one in this photo.

Our apartment is on the sixth floor, so we see a lot of birds. There's a flock of crows in the neighborhood, and some of them fly past our windows (even after dark! I think of them as juvenile delinquents with nothing better to do than cruise Shirlington in packs, looking for the tastiest offerings from the local restaurant dumpsters). And we have blue jays, robins, sparrows -- the usual feathered crowd. But I don't see a lot of hawks here. So this one caught my eye, with his typical raptor flight style -- soaring slowly with wings outstretched, eyeing the ground below for a little something for brunch. "That's a hawk," I said. And when he obligingly circled away from our building, I amended my statement: "That's a red-tailed hawk!"

Ted Andrews, who died in 2009, knew a thing or two about animals and their magical connections. He devoted four pages to hawks in his book Animal Speak: The Spiritual and Magical Powers of Creatures Great and Small, and two of those pages cover the red-tailed variety. It's fitting that I saw my new friend when I did; Andrews wrote that hawks' power is greatest at the spring and fall equinoxes. Like other high-flying birds such as crows and eagles, hawks are considered carriers of spiritual messages. But Andrews said the red-tail "has ties to the kundalini, the seat of the primal life force... It may pop up as a totem at that point in your life where you begin to move toward your soul purpose more dynamically."

Red-tailed hawks are fearless -- and deadly. Andrews said he once saw a red-tail attack a snake and carry it off, the snake's head hanging by only a shred of skin. He suggested those with a relationship to the red-tail should be careful in expressing themselves: "There will unfold within you the ability to tear off the heads of any snakes in your life, or anyone or anything seen as an enemy." (As some of you know, I've been in a lengthy struggle to sort out issues related to my mother's estate. In light of that whole mess, I found this part of red-tail's message very interesting.)

In any case, my new friend seems to be saying that delays and wheel-spinning are coming to an end for me. That's a much more positive message than dead cherry blossoms. I'll take it.

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Speaking of progress: I'll be putting the finishing touches on Maggie in the Dark this week; look for publishing news next weekend. Which is good, because I'm hoping to draft book 2, Maggie on the Cusp, during CampNaNoWriMo in April. And I'm already thinking about writing some spin-off stories featuring two characters who only get a couple of scenes in this book.

In addition to that, I'm working on a sci-fi story for the next Five59 anthology, which should be published in mid-April.

Why, it's almost like a dam is breaking...

Happy spring!

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These moments of red-tailed blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

The vernal equinox: halfway to somewhere.

Happy Ostara!

Today is the vernal equinox in the Northern Hemisphere, the day on which we supposedly have equal minutes of daylight and darkness. (Although as the Capital Weather Gang explains, that's not strictly true.)

It's also the first day of spring -- or at least, most Americans think so. Meteorologists believe spring began on March 1. And the ancient Celts considered Imbolc, February 1, to be the beginning of spring, based on the lengthening hours of daylight.

I expect it's warmer in February in Ireland and Scotland than it is here in the mid-Atlantic. Even March is feeling a tad chilly; we basked in 70-degree days not long ago, but some parts of our region actually got a dusting of snow last night. This is a lot more like the spring weather we had when I was growing up in northern Indiana.

Regardless, spring is definitely here. Daffodils are shooting up, and the cherry trees in our neighborhood seemed to bloom overnight last week. Which means my favorites -- the redbud trees -- won't be far behind.

I think I've mentioned that I'm in the process of making seasonal table toppers. I settled on the Olympic Forest Baby Blanket pattern for my spring table topper, but of course I couldn't leave well enough alone. Instead of just knitting the trees in a springlike green, I decided to do the picot edging in lavender, and add redbud blooms to the branches by lining them with French knots in the same color.

I'd hoped to have the project done by today, but as you can see in this photo, I'm still working on it. The edging is done (although it's curling under -- I still need to block the project) and I've finished just over half of the French knots. You can see the finished ones on the right side of the photo. The green expanse on the left side is the part I still have to do.

It's taking a long time. Every now and then, I sigh, thinking about how much I still have to do. My daughter Amy told me today that she thought I was a little crazy when I told her I planned to do all these French knots. "I'd almost rather do neeps," she said. Then she explained that a neep involves wrapping your yarn around the needle six times, and then knitting all six wraps together at once.

"Thanks, but no," I told her. "I'll stick to French knots."

But it's a lot of French knots, and I'm a little discouraged right now. It would be easy to stop, in fact, and say I never meant to finish it -- that the all-green side is part of the overall design. No one would know but me. (Well, and you guys, since you're reading this.) Or I could set it aside and work on something else -- something with a more immediate reward. I'm really good about finishing projects. I'm sure I'll come back to this one. Eventually.

You're waiting for my point, aren't you? Well, here it is: In any project, being half-done is the most painful place to be. Starting is easy -- the idea is fresh and you can't wait to get going. And the last bit is also easy -- the finish line is so close you can smell it. But the middle? Ugh. You know exactly how much work you've already put into the thing, and you know you need to do it all again.

It's not just true of knitting, of course. It's true of writing, too, and of every other creative endeavor, as well as some not-so-creative ones. One of my favorite parts of Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird is the story that explains the title: her then-ten-year-old brother had put off doing a big school project that required a report on each of several birds. It was the night before the report was due, and he hadn't even begun. And their father put his arm around the boy and said, "Just take it bird by bird."

The boy hadn't yet begun, and I'm halfway through, but the result is the same: letting yourself dread the work ahead isn't going to get it done. So I'm going to keep plugging away at it, French knot by French knot, and eventually it'll be done. (I'll post a photo, I promise.)

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Here's a thing that's nearing the finish line: Spider's Lifeline. The final edits are in, and I'm aiming for publication in the last week of March. Keep an eye on your inbox for the date.

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These moments of bloggy perseverance have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Finding balance.

James Jordan | flickr.com

Last weekend was Ostara, the Pagan celebration of the vernal equinox. Spiritually, at least, if not in reality, the spring and fall equinoxes are the two days of the year on which daylight and darkness are of equal length. On those two days, the dark is supposed to be balanced with the light.

Pagans take that as a signal to try to find balance in their own lives. And I'm trying. Really, I'm trying. (All together now: "Yes, you're very trying.")

I'm working on a sweater right now that I'm dying to get off the needles. It's short-sleeved but tunic length, and so I won't have many more opportunities to wear it this season. (Although if the weather keeps shilly-shallying around about turning springlike here in the mid-Atlantic, I could get another month or so out of it. Thirty degrees at 9:00 a.m. today? Really?) But see, the problem is that I'm also supposed to be editing Dragon's Web, and drafting a rough outline for the book that comes next. And cleaning the house. And so on.

I've mentioned before that when I get into first-draft mode, I seem to work best by holing up in my apartment and writing for long stretches of time. If the writing is on fire and the words are coming easily, I can knock out a 50,000 word novel in three weeks this way, even with a full-time job.

But that practice doesn't leave much time for participating in real life. I tend to surface after doing that first draft and blink owlishly at the world, as if I've been in a dark cave and am just now coming into the light. And then I'll pick up a knitting project while the first draft ripens, and go at that every night until it's done. And any marketing I end up doing for my books is more or less an afterthought.

So with Dragon's Web, I decided not to set myself a hard-and-fast deadline. I decided to start the writing when I started it, avoid pushing myself to write every day, and finish whenever the book was done. Yeah, well, that gave me a little too much latitude. I found myself writing only every couple of days, together with one really long session on the weekends, and a lot of frittering around in between. It felt like it took me forever to get that book done. And even though I've had the edits back from my editor for several days, I've been stalling on addressing them.

I guess some people can live like that, but I hate it. I hate having stuff hanging over my head, undone. Whether it's a book or a sweater or some other project, I want to get it done and get it off my plate.

Which is why this sweater is driving me crazy right now. It's almost done -- all I have to do is knit the buttonhole band and the sleeve edgings, sew on the buttons, and weave in the ends. I could have finished it today -- but I had the edits for the book, and the outline for the next book, and this blog post to take care of first. The good news is that once I hit "publish" on this post, I'll have all of that done.

All of which is to say that I'm still trying to find a balance of writing, knitting, and real life that works for me. I know I'm task-oriented and deadline-oriented, so I've signed up for the April session of Camp NaNoWriMo. The structure should help me stick to the task better, and the deadline should keep me working toward the goal. But with any luck, I'll remember to come up for air once in a while, too.

It also means that I need to have the sweater done by Tuesday night at the latest. So if you'll excuse me....

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Oh, right. I guess I should tell you that I'm aiming to release Dragon's Web sometime in May, with the follow-up book of the duology then coming out in June. I've never released two books back-to-back like this before. It should be interesting.

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These moments of bloggy balance have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.