Traveling Toward...

Good things are traveling to us, of which we know naught.

Santa and her reindeer will be On the Road!
(This was my card a few years ago, but they head out every year.)

BELOW: “Mary and Joseph on the Way to Bethlehem"; detail of the Portinari Altarpiece (c. 1475) by Hugo van der Goes, Flemish, now in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

Other kinds of things are on the way too, of course.
Like, did you know, our galaxy, the Milky Way, and our neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, are falling toward each other [per NASA] at the rate of [mumbledy mumledy numbers], and it's looking like we will collide in some 4 billion years? That's around the same time the Sun dies,  so one or the other, good-bye Earth.
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Yesterday I was browsing through blog posts tagged 'Christmas' (on l'astronave), and saving photos to post online (like, on FB where no one saw them before)--or to repost them here because I love them.
And I have been blogging so long, I forget some of my posts.

Especially some little oddments, like my holiday Costello:

Gosh, reading my posts, I can see that I was down last year more than I realized. Mostly because of work--and there, mostly because of the bad ending with Ass't Man, who left within weeks of our final falling out around Halloween.
(I'd confronted him about his disturbing (to me) behavior when drunk, and in shame (I think), he got defensive and counter-attacked...
And that was the end of that.
[Funny to think he would tell this story entirely differently.])

The idea of reincarnation has been so helpful to me this year.  The idea, that is, that this life is a repeating Spiritual Psych Lab... gives me permission or space to acknowledge feelings, especially ones that appear to exist contradictory to fact.

I mean, last year I knew I was sad and mad about the bad ending with Ass't Man, but I felt I "shouldn't" care so much about this guy who had so often been a jerk to me.

There're other ways to think of it, though, that aren't so tit-for-tat. Relationships aren't a balance sheet. There are a lot of X-factors.
If I add in the idea of reincarnation, it makes more Storybook sense:
This person was someone I am connected to karmically--we've met before in other lives (or, to be less fantastical, I have met the type before in this life)--and I want it to work out, get better, this time. And then it doesn't, and I have feelings about that.
Simple.

That doesn't have to be literally true to be helpful.
Telling the story that way creates a wedge, a little opening where I can feel what I feel, without feeling it needs to be logical.
I don't have to defend it intellectually.
[Adult Child of an Academic Family, here. ACAF.]

Musing on reincarnation, I had a funny little thought about my mother too:
I would very much like to meet her again.

I felt a little exited by the idea of seeing her, like I used to feel when I was going to visit her in my twenties--a decade when she was doing pretty well.
I always remember that on one visit, her downstairs neighbor told us that our laughter had kept her awake until 3 a.m.--but we were so happy, she hadn't wanted to call up and tell us to be quiet.

A mental-health diagnosis never really fit my mother.
Her story was so much more complicated than "a chemical imbalance". That is true for a LOT of people.

I mean, the WORLD is out of balance--how do we stay on our feet?
Various ways...
And some people don't.

I'd say my mother's 'diagnosis' was, to put it simply,
"She was a sensitive soul, and the world was too hard for her."
___________________

Penny Cooper said, sometimes things are too hard for the humans.
And then she went back to roasting marshmallows. (The Girlettes are not really interested in human psychology.)

[This ^ was at Winter Solstice, in Housemate's backyard in 2019. What was one thing that was traveling towards us? Covid-19!]
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The idea that the soul would try, try again... that disastrous endings aren't the end forever... I like that.
Even if it's not truel, there are lots of souls like that living right now, and factoring in the idea that This Is Not ALL of It, when I meet them, I can enjoy them, remembering I AM NOT THE SAVIOR (which my mother wanted me to be).

We're not going to work out all of our karma, get it all lined up and sorted--and we can't do it for each other anyway (though of course we help and hurt and otherwise influence each other).
But as St. Paul said,
"Beloveds, work out your own salvation."

Isn't that a curious thing to say? I used to think that sounded mean.
But really, it's a high calling:
ultimately, you are your own. You "belong" to you. Or to the Universe, if you like.

This in no way means it doesn't matter how we treat one another!!!
Rather, the opposite.
We are glass ornaments, and it helps to treat each other gently.
But if you don't like an ornament, or it's broken and cuts you, you can set it down . . . and walk away.

I am trying to say too much, too simply here.
But it adds up to a kind of jolly message, in my mind:
RELAX.
Bad things happen--or things that feel bad to us--like galaxies colliding and suns exploding. It is the law of nature.

Friendships end.
People "unalive" themselves. [I think that word, unalive, is a work-around so social media sites don't flag you?Anyway, I kind of like it!]

It's not that these things aren't tragic.
They are!
But... they are not the whole story.
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Well, anyway, the upshot is, I am in a much better mood this Advent. It helped to feel angry at my mother this fall, for the first time.
And it helps to acknowledge that last year I was just plain old sad about Ass't Man, even if he didn't "deserve" it (a ridiculous concept anyway.)

Advent is a time of Traveling Toward...
All these atoms, or souls, or stories going round and round and bouncing off one another... It's too complicated to chart.
Scientists aren't even sure that the Milky Way and Andromeda WILL collide. Much less are they sure of the weather tomorrow.

I am pretty sure, however, that L & M and Annette are coming over later today for banana pancakes. And the house is a mess! So that's how I'm going to move: toward cleaning it up.
And next week, Marz will be here, and I'll make Christmas Eve dinner.

Here Marz is ten years ago! She is hanging Mr Robinson, the Flying Angel of Christmas. (This was the tiny one-bedroom we shared the first coupla few years after she moved here. She slept on the couch for two years. My goodness.)

And then, we will wrap up the first quarter of this century.
It did not go as I'd hoped (though I am personally happy and well enough).
You too?
I remember on New Year's Eve 1999 thinking maybe we were on the edge of a peaceful prosperous world.
*PEALS OF CRAZED LAUGHTER*

Stop it right now, you all! says the Angel. [from 2018]

Well, as they say in Reincarnation:
Everyone's got karma, or we wouldn't have incarnated here.
Or as St. Augustine said, we're all just pilgrims here.

But sometimes we get it together. Souls have fun!
Starsky & Hutch in the North Woods (2017)

This ^ is my adaptation of a photo-manipulation/paint-over by fan artist extraordinaire, Mortmere---her original is S/H on a snowy beach: "Wonderland", here.

One more favorite--below--my minimalist manger from 2020, the pandemic year when we were locked down.

"Fear not!"