The Mayan Apocalypse wasn’t a total bust. I had to get up early on Friday, December 21, 2012 to fill in for one of my east coast co-workers watching data update. If this sounds like watching paint dry, you’ve got the right idea. I’ve been fortunate to have few days in the last year or so where I had to get up before the birds, so I didn’t mind filling in for a couple of days to see the dawn and babysit batch.
Seeing the dawn was a fabulous treat, too. Not only do I miss it most days, but the Winter Solstice sunrise was a spectacular show. Usually mornings in northern California are foggy and grey, something like a soft flannel blanket covering the day so that we can adjust to things gradually. The cat still has all his stripes. My desk still needs to be cleaned off. You don’t want to be faced with every detail in sharp relief all at once. Usually, by the time you’ve had your second cup of coffee (preferably Peets or Thanksgiving Songbird coffee when I have coffee, but Starbucks in a pinch), you can see if there will be any blue sky showing through and perhaps a bit of afternoon sunshine. You don’t want to be ambushed by mornings in northern California. You want to get to know them gradually, like your mother told you about the guys you dated.
December 21, 2012 was hyped pretty heavily although most of what I saw was quite tongue-in-cheek. No one I know in the tarot or fringe communities I visit actually thought there were going to be asteroid attacks or other planet-ending events. We’ve all been shaken by recent events like the hurricane and the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy and the ensuing debate over whether it should be guns or mentally ill people who should be registered. I pray for kindness and relief of suffering, myself. It’s a small thing, my prayers, but in spite of their size relative to the issues, I still send them out.
In a Far Side kind of way, I wonder, if the dinosaurs had had adequate 4G connectivity, would they have been wiped out? So many people think that having advance notice of an event will help stave it off. That’s one of the hardest things about my work as a tarot reader. I have to explain that knowing things ahead of time may allow you to pack an umbrella, but it doesn’t stop the storm.
I don’t mean to say that having dawn break on Mayan Apocalypse day was a disappointment, either. I was happy it did but just about as happy as any other morning. The alarm sounded. I cursed my Blackberry for its cheeriness, grabbed it and tried to shut it off. It wanted my password, the new one I created yesterday. Fine time to ask me a question like that!
I realized that I didn’t have my glasses on so all the buttons looked like r’s, sort of. I groped the bedside avalanche for my glasses and after a few tries I found them. With the keyboard in better, not best focus, I turned off the alarm. Even though I knew the emails from the batch jobs I had to support at this uncivilized hour were not going to show up on the Small Screen, I looked, hoping something had changed technically that would allow me to stay under the layers of quilts and blankets next to the warm and fuzzy husband and dog who snored undisturbed by the alarm sounding.
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| Victorian Trade Card Tarot (c) Copyright 2010 Marcia McCord |
No. I had to get up and go into the office. At least it is just the room on the other side of the bathroom.
I don’t know about you, but when I get up in the morning, I’m a lot more like a typical northern California morning. I wake up gradually. First, there’s the fog thing. I mean between my ears. I get the thinking or speaking version of myself but not both. And then there’re the eyes. In spite of the assistance of corrective lenses, usually I get one eye to work while the other one sleeps in. It’s stuff like this that makes me completely against video-conferencing for work. I need to spare others the horror. When both eyes work, I may pass a mirror and realize my hair is a lop-sided Big Bird thing that won’t be tamed until gravity and some serious brushing or combing happens.
Padding into the office, I sat at my desk and looked at my laptop for those emails that won’t show up on the Blackberry. Batch was humming along, a little late but no worse than it has been for a month or so. Good. No work apocalypse either. I got sucked into the vortex of answering questions from east coast co-workers and then looked up.
The sky was red! I looked over at my home computer to watch any messages flying by there. A Facebook friend joked about the bright red sky, “It’s happening! It’s happ,” and simulated being cut off mid-syllable. There were responses about sneakers smoking with dry ice, corrections about rapture not being the same as The End. All the while, the sky was a glorious blaze as the sun came up.
This is unusual here. Granted, I do attempt to sleep through many a sunrise, but the ones I see are golden, not red. There’s the old rhyme, Red sky at morning, sailor take warning. Somehow, the sun sneaked a Pink Floyd-worthy laser show in under the cloudbank for us early birds.
“John, wake up,” I rushed in to make sure he didn’t miss the pretty sky. He wakes up in stages, too, and wandered into the kitchen.
“Wow, it’s red in here.” The kitchen has a lot of windows that let east and south sunlight in. I went back to my office to tend to the batch jobs, still humming along. I checked some reports. Yup, looks like sales data came in for the day. I looked out my office window.
“Oh, kitty!” I breathed to Tony who was purring on the desk, observing the vacant bird feeder and branches waving in the morning breeze.
“A rainbow!”
The red sky sunrise had caught the morning fog-drizzle at just the right angle to make a great rainbow to the west. It lasted so long that I wasn’t sure I was still awake. My friend Kaye posted some pictures from her house of the rainbow in all its colors. Good, I wasn’t dreaming after all. As quickly as it had appeared, the color faded and became a typical winter morning again.
The Wheel of Fortune in Tarot reminds us that no matter what we do, time keeps going, whirling us into the future. The old year is gone; the new one is ahead. The Mayan Long Count Calendar ran out and just as I told my friends so did my 2012 calendar. I’ve started my 2013 calendar and even have a booking for a tarot party! While the wheel of time keeps turning, there are special moments, special to you. Savor, cherish, indulge in the now of those moments. Each one is special. Each one is unique.
Even if each moment isn’t December 21, 2012 when the earth, the sun and the center of the Milky Way Galaxy line up in the great Galactic Alignment that the Mayans noted for this date, because they did get something astronomical astoundingly right with their Long Count (disputed, of course), you can line up your life to make the best of each moment for this coming year and years to come.
Best wishes!
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