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!

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....

***
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.

Surf's up Thursday!

As I write to you, here on this Sunday night in mid-March, it's snowing outside. Again. This is approximately the 273rd time it has snowed here in the mid-Atlantic this winter, and I am pretty much sick and tired of it.

But there's a ray of hope that warmer days are coming. Just yesterday, I ran errands without a jacket. Today, before the snow began, I saw a robin! And this Thursday, March 20th, is promising for two reasons: it's the spring equinox, which is the traditional first day of spring in the U.S.; and it's the day Undertow will be released.*

The events in this book occur over Labor Day weekend (for non-U.S. folks, that's the weekend preceding the first Monday in September) in 2023. It's the last big summer weekend, and a lot of people spend it at the beach. So to celebrate both the release of the book (which, coincidentally, is set in Norfolk and Virginia Beach, VA) and the end to this freakishly long winter, I'm throwing a virtual beach party on Facebook next Saturday, March 22nd, from 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. Eastern time.

I have lots of stuff planned. I've pulled together a playlist of beach music, and a number of my fellow indie authors have generously donated copies of their books as prizes for the games we'll be playing. I've got some other fun prizes, too. And we're getting things cranked up already. The caterer is  setting out the food, and we're recruiting lifeguards and nominating cabana boys and girls, and talking about who should play Tess, Sue and Darrell.

Of course, we'll have door prizes, too. But because Facebook gets cranky when you try to post a contest there, I'm putting the Rafflecopter for the door prizes here on the blog. I'm going to be giving away a $25 Amazon gift card and two $5 Amazon gift cards. All you have to do to enter is let me know you're planning to come to the party. Simple enough, right?

The usual and customary hearth/myth giveaway rules apply, to wit:

1. Friends and family may definitely enter.
2. Winners of previous contests may win again.
3. There will be winners. I am getting this stuff out of my house, one way or the other.
4. As always, the judge's decisions are arbitrary, capricious, and final.

Hope to see you Saturday! Good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

*By the way, you can pre-order Undertow right now at both B&N and iTunes for 99 cents. On Thursday, the price goes up everywhere to $2.99. (Editing to indicate that the 99-cent deal is not available at Smashwords. Sorry for the confusion -- it was totally my fault.)

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

It's deja vu all over again. Sigh.

At least the critter didn't see his shadow yesterday.

It's that twitchy time of year for me.  It usually starts sometime in mid-January -- not long after the holiday haze wears off, but before the days begin to lengthen appreciably.  Maybe it has something to do with flipping the calendar page.  Or with the knowledge that the weather will be icky for at least another month, and there's nothing I can do about it.  In any case, I always seem to suffer an attack of disgruntlement at this time of year.

I'm not a SAD (seasonal affective disorder) sufferer.  It's not the lack of light, really; as an office denizen, I spend most of my daylight hours inside anyway.  And it's not a full-blown case of depression.  It's just that -- I dunno -- there's not a lot to look forward to right now.

Observing Imbolc helps me.  The beginning of February marks the halfway point of winter, and so Imbolc is a reminder that it won't be cold/gray/snowy forever.  (We had some conversational snow this weekend -- enough to make all the drivers freak out, but not enough to ice up the pavement.  Don't get me started on DC drivers in the snow.)  Winter weather in the mid-Atlantic tends to wrap up by the spring equinox.  I can remember one year when we had a serious snowfall around the middle of March -- we had to delay my older daughter's sixth birthday party by a week, which ought to give you a clue about how long ago it was -- but that's the latest that I can remember seeing a significant accumulation here.

Things were different when I was growing up.  Back when I was walking to school uphill both ways (it's a joke, okay? I rode a bus to school! And not the short bus, either, smarty pants!), we had to step over snowbanks to go trick-or-treating in October, and spring lasted about a day and a half.  I like to tell this to people who have grown up around here, just to see the horror in their eyes.  Muahaha.

(I have a bad feeling that I've told the trick-or-treating story here before.  If I've bored you with it multiple times, I apologize.)

Anyway, I didn't intend to make this post about the weather.  It's just that the gray skies are part of my general disgruntlement.  But my real problem is that another year has passed and I feel like I'm spinning my wheels and not getting anywhere.  I think I need a talking-to, and I'm just the person to deliver it:

"Okay, Cantwell, listen up.  Short term, you've got just two more weeks before you get another three-day weekend, and your sweater's almost done.  Longer term, you'll be in Indy next month -- and you get to take the train, which will be a hoot!  And you're going to Alaska in late May.  Now there's a milestone -- once you get to Alaska, you will have visited all fifty states, and you'll have just one more destination left on your bucket list!  That's pretty cool, huh?  And not only have you been a published author for a couple of years now, but you'll be wrapping up the Pipe Woman Chronicles this spring.  And don't forget that you just bought yourself a really nice podcasting mic, just in case you get the urge to make some books-on-tape or something. Just because you're still in DC doesn't mean you're not making progress.  It's a marathon, not a sprint, okay?"

Okay, okay, you're right.  These bleak days will pass.  But just so you know, Pep Talk Deliverer, we'll probably have to do this again next year.

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This moment of bloggy malaise is brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. (Sigh.)