5K Mosey, and a bit

from the step-tracking app on my cell phone

Once for my promise to do so,
and once for someone who couldn’t,
one time for one who wouldn’t do so,
or told himself he shouldn’t. 

As previously reblogged about, I had every intention of taking part in this year’s Worldwide WordPress 5 KM (wwwpk5) event. Since time did not permit me to do this yesterday, I decided to do it today. This actually worked for the best: yesterday I started breaking in a pair of Docs I recently bought off the internet from someone who obviously underestimated the time it can take to break the boots in properly.

What that meant for today was that my feet were quite thrilled at the notion of putting on a pair of trail runners, even if that meant a little moseying! I checked with the strained muscle on the back of my hip; and although moseying wasn’t its first choice for the day, we agreed sitting would be much worse. So off we went.

Where I walked today is a park near the outskirts of the city, with a one-kilometer track around a pond, about five kilometers away from where I live. I have a path there that, if I time things right, I don’t have to stop for annoying pedestrian signals along the way. My timing today was quite good; and my way to and from the park was uninterrupted. When I got to the track at the park, I decided to do five laps as the weather was great (just how I like it: overcast, cool, and breezy), and it seemed as though my strained hip was willing to play with.

The result was a little over 15 KM in about three hours. It was a fun walk, even if I could feel my hip slowing my usual pace a little; and I am grateful to the good folks at WordPress for holding an event like this – I am already looking very forward to the next such event!

A riddle from a simpler time

A large portion of my life has been focused on learning to identify polarized ways of thinking and perceiving the world. In therapy, I learned to identify this sort of thinking within myself; and I guess it was just a matter of time until I learned to start recognizing this sort of thinking in others and in society. It isn’t my mission to eliminate this kind of thinking – in my case, it’s how my mind is hardwired – but I do dedicate myself to being aware of this kind of thinking. Usually, from here, I can make the choice as to whether or not I wish to base my actions on a polarized perspective … it is the awareness that provides me with the choice. This whole process is not lost on me when I look at the world around me – from polarized politics down to us versus them mentalities found in all levels of society, right down to bitter arguments between people who prefer to eat one way, and others who do not. In contemplating the things I am learning and discovering about my impressions of the Cailleach, the polarization offered by a Winter (and thus also a Summer) goddess has not been lost on me, either.

Angry people

This may not have much to do with the Cailleach; but it is an issue that has recently come up in my life, and since it blindsided me more than any storm ever has, and has to do with an ending, maybe it does have some remote relevance to the Cailleach. Either way, I would post two little pieces of advice here ….

One, in life there are going to be angry people who will set out to hurt you. Sometimes these people are simply confused about something, and are lashing out. Sometimes they are simply trying to distract themselves from their own inner torment by trying to bring pain to others. Neither situation excuses the behavior, it simply explains it. How you react to this will be for you to choose, not them.

Two, don’t make the mistake of letting your own negative reactions to such people blind you to those in your life who would not deliberately hurt you. In doing so, you award a victory to someone who would hurt you, and a loss to someone who would not. And you run the risk of doing to someone else what was just done to you – perpetuating their anger is not the solution.

Time

I was doing some reading the other day, when I read about a group in Scotland who were attending a workshop of sorts, and got to talking about medicine wheels. While I am not aware of this concept being native to the Isles, at least not in the the way it was described where I read, this caused a breeze to blow through my grey forest, bringing down a few interesting leaves of thought. Close in shape as well as function to some medicine wheels (accepting that some, but not all, medicine wheels align themselves to astronomical events) are places like Stonehenge. As with medicine wheels, these places in the Isles seem to have been built up and used for different purposes by succeeding generations.

Women of power in the Viking Age

One of the things about trying to understand the Cailleach is an attempt to understand the role of women in ancient societies that may have had something to do with the Cailleach. Thus, this article, written by Marianne Moen and titled, “Women in the Viking Age then and now,” caught my attention rather quickly. The article, to briefly summarize, suggests that perhaps the greater degree of sexist and chauvinistic thinking toward women exists now, among archaeologists (and thus the cultures they operate from and within), rather than during the Viking Age. Moen raises some very valid examples of how many are misinterpreting the available evidence in order to fit Viking Age Scandinavian society into a gender framework that it quite likely doesn’t belong within.