Betwixt Mabon and Yom Kippur
We stand on the eve of the Autumn Equinox. We are all caught on the fringe of Mabon and the feast of Yom Kippur .
The days are of equal light and dark as the year turns into its last quarter. I catch myself waiting at the crossroads for so many things to happen and after the rain of the last few days I wonder if they ever will. Symbolically I stand too at the door of my last quarter of being and doing. It was Bertrand Russel who said that it is best as we age that we discover and debate the issues that are transpersonal and collective so that in the end we slip away into the great sea from which life arose. It is Mabon tomorrow and between nightfall on Sunday September 24th to nightfall on Monday 25th it is Yom Kippur the day of atonement. It is the merging of two traditions in three days and in those days we are invited to examine the state of ours souls and of our conscience.
I am the first to admit that every saint has a past and every sinner a future. Yet even though we discuss, debate and describe ourselves in all our failings and features we run ever unaware from the Freudian defence mechanisms that make rationalisation possible and permissable. How could it be otherwise?
As I waiting on Zoom for the Flag meeting to begin on Wednesday night I heard the Councillors rage about speed limits in Wales and wondered if we could ever lift our understanding beyond ourselves. One told a story about how a woman on a mobility scooter seemed likely to over take them as if it was a blow to them individually and to their masculinity. Another moaned from his perspective of the voice of the motorcyclist but not one voice I heard considered how the issue effects others. To be fair another Councillor pointed out that they wondered what it would take to discuss poverty in Ystradgynlais with the same degree of passion. I watched and commented somewhat sarcastically that perhaps now the issue effected them individually that they were prepared to discuss green issues.
Watching from my phone makes one invisible largely to those within the room yet I am told reliably that they could all hear me very well. Throughout the meeting Beamble and Bracken attended the meeting too with their faces looking over the assembled worthies in mutual incomprehension and disbelief.
I smiled as another said they had finally watched ' Pride' and observed that the 'gays' had been given their rights but that the Miners had not. I wondered if they had any appreciation the alliance and solidarity is the way to change things. Later the same individual made the claim that the 'blacks' too had achieved equality now. I wondered deep down inside what it took to appreciate I insituational racism, conditioned prejudice and folk chauvinism buried so long and so hidden that white men of a certain age cannot imagine what it is yo be a different gender, ethnicity and identity. Older white men too often cannot see that their sense of entitlement makes all attempts for equality to appear as oppression to themselves.
I pointed out as another went on that 5uere about too much of LGBT awareness for their tastes and the war memorial was for all including the 'gays'. I pointed out that the 'Enigma' machine was created by Alan Turin and probably contributed to shortening the war by two years. But sadly I wasn't sure if they understood the machine s significance or even understood that Turin committed suicide after being chemically castrated by legal decree. I did reflect on commenting that that is why the Apple corporation have as its an Apple with a bite taken from it. Steve Jobs was aware that Turin committed suicide by eating a poisoned apple. The legal sentence of chemical castration destroyed his formidable mind and probably put off the computer revolution by ten ot fifteen years. What would have been possible today had Turin lived till 1992 when he would have been 80.
The innate conservatism and prejudice of age is something we should all fight. We should ask ourselves and research everyday what we believe and why. We should read more than one book and talk to those we disagree with . At this weekend from Mabon to Yom Kippur we should revolutionise our perceptions and beliefs. Too many white men over 50 years of age produce innately conservative and narrow responses. I have watched over 25 years their responses to minimum wages, fair wage, black sections in the Labour Party, the ideas of positive discrimination, the green agenda, ULEZ, speed limits and more be opposed and then foregotten as a new normal is established. Those safe and secure in their identity feel no threat from those who will come after us. I end with Mabon and Yom Kippur and the quote from Kahil Gibran...' a rest, a moment upon the wind and another woman will bare me. Whether or not the belief in the circle of birth,life and death is but a metaphor, a genetic means of descendants or the truth hardly matters...' seasons don't fear the reaper and non of us should fear change of self, awareness or perception. Have a good day ....
