Written in writing group Tuesday night:
Let’s see. I wanted to write about the book Connection. She talks about being connected to yourself first, then with important people in your life, then with issues and projects that are important to you. How do you decide what’s important to you? Turns out it’s a good idea to examine your values. What is really important and what is not so important. Because you don’t want to be spending a lot of energy on things that aren’t really important. Then you want to look at your life and see where you are spending energy on things that aren’t important. How do you know whether something is important to you or not? That takes both feeling and thinking. It can take quite a bit of time to sort things out and good to spend the time. For myself I know that my top value is truth, honesty, being straight-forward. Another really important one is beauty, especially the beauty of Nature. Nature is very important to me, and I realize that for me that means not only the natural world, the planet, but also the sky, the sun and moon and stars. Compassion is really important, kindness, and being able to care about somebody’s welfare even if you don’t like them. Family has not been important. I was married and divorced, never had children. My parents were alcoholics. I care about my siblings, but relationships with them are not a high priority. Since COVID, we’ve been meeting about once a month on Zoom, and that’s just about right.
Job, work. I was lucky, I had a small independent income, and that allowed me to live an inexpensive life and do what I want to with my time. I have a degree in Astronomy, and I’ve done planetarium work which is great fun. A planetarium is a tremendous teaching instrument. Unfortunately, a lot of Planetaria get prepackaged shows with a lot of pictures, but they don’t really use the machine. The machine has a projector and a dome, and can duplicate the night sky for wherever and whenever you want. You can also run the sun forward along the ecliptic, its path in the sky, and you can see how the sun goes up and down with the seasons, and how the days are long in the summer and short in the winter. I remember at one point thinking I should find a way — maybe teach a program — for people who run the machines so they could use them creatively. But I never followed that one out. Instead I got involved with teaching folk dance, which I loved, and then discovered Sacred Circle Dance which grew out of the understanding that traditional folk dances had a spiritual dimension.
Added later: I notice that I didn’t follow out my ideas about teaching astronomy. Instead I turned to Folk Dance with a spiritual dimension. I see that I value the spiritual dimension more than the scientific one.