02-03-10
Forecast and Faery Finder
By Janice Scott-Reeder and the Bitwit
According to Llewellyn’s Magical Almanac, today’s color is yellow and the incense is Bay Laurel. Today is St. Blaise’s Day.
FORECASTS:
Deck: Navigators Tarot of the Mystic Sea.
Today’s Tarot Card is the Hierophant: intuition. Welcome to the no win situation. Sacrifices are being demanded and if you do not make them, even though you are over extended, you lose. Next time around, you won’t spread yourself and your resources so thin.
Deck: Healing with the Fairies.
The Faeries say:
This is not a good day to be moving to another location.
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Today’s Cat Comfort Card is:
Sophisticat: “Steep yourself in culture. Learn one new thing today.”
Deck: The Fairies’ Oracle by Brian Froud & Jessica MacBeth
Today’s Faery Finder is on the lookout for:
The Dark Lady is the High Priestess of ritual. Through ritual the unconscious power is channeled and manifests in the material world. She is the guardian of all things unborn. Always invoke her when planting seeds or writing business plans.
Today’s Lo Shu Number is 3 and the Element is Wood. The Tiger finds conflict today but the Rat has ease. Today is not an auspicious day for haircuts, medical procedures, signing contracts, gambling, starting construction or births.
Today’s Message from the Universe is: “The universal law of justice and freedom rules in everyone, for everyone and through everyone. Being in harmony with the will of my Soul, neither a person now a situation can prevent me from attaining my highest good. I trust in God’s infinite wisdom.
“Everything is now working out perfectly now.” Annie Marquier creating a world of peace one thought at a kind.
COMMENTARIES BY JANICE SCOTT-REEDER
There are those who believe in wooly caterpillars and those who await the groundhogs. I check Lenuxx’s ruff. There will be 6 more weeks of winter. Lenuxx is seldom wrong. He didn’t start growing his winter coat until really late this year and now it is coming in. That’s exactly the way the winter worked down here.
Poor Haiti is all I can say. First off the evangelics are down there trying to recruit the massively Roman Catholic population with selective food dispensing. Now another Haitian group has accused them of taking advantage of the distraught parents and running massive adoptive effects to save the souls of those little Catholics. And if that was not enough of an affront, another earthquake is in the works within 10 years and the aftershocks are not due to stop. The part of the fault that erupted this time is further from Port-au-Prince that the part that has been building pressure and it dumped all its pressure onto that area. A massive quake in both directions from the epicenter is expected. That endangers the Jamaica, too. The aftershocks are not stopping and 5.0 is considered a normal one. Now for a lesson you don’t want, the next quake will be closed\r if not right in the middle of the city and probably stronger. The nice thing about a hurricane is it moves on. Earthquake just keep on giving. Once more I say, thank you little crustaceans upon whose skeletons I reside. You are geostable and I love you.
The girls, Flame and Fiona, are in the cage. They really pulled a good one on me but Mommy is pretty smart after all the years. I gave them a can of food. Fifteen minutes later I returned to find an empty dish. So I removed the dish and looked under the cats. Yes, I said under the cats. They cannot have any more food after the deadline because they are getting their belly scars tomorrow. I found a third of the can, nicely covered by the newspaper just waiting to be a midnight snack. I removed it and you have never seen such upset kitties. I got the narrow eyed stare. Yup, they had plans.
I certainly got a lot of people thinking yesterday. So, I’ll explain a little more today. I see people constantly arriving at the shop looking for the next ideology of the day. They change religions and philosophies as the next charismatic leader appears, constantly dissatisfied and always trashing the previous one. Then there are the sponges. They want a little bit of everything from everyone, never seem to get full and once again, continue onward dissatisfied. I’ll cut to the chase. Each group just didn’t live up to the standards of their original belief system so they went out seeking one more compatible, over and over again. And with each one, they have to change it because each new belief is unconsciously returned to the first system for approval. Now, if they just change one little thing and then the next, eventually they will get what they wanted in the first place which was a pat on the head from the first system. It is not going to happen. Read that very slowly.
The result is we have the James Rays. He started out the son of an Evangelic Christian minister. He took those techniques and played them into a “New Agey” mixture of profit motivation, psychology and religion while removing the Christian adjective. He is not the only one. There are more of them than you can count in an afternoon. Meanwhile, the rest of us just sit around shaking our heads. This new motivation, the Secret and do join us in the sweat lodge group are spiritually bankrupt and they have many outlets.
Let me tell you a little personal story. I had been very happy and successful in my little store for 15 years. I went to a “New Age” exhibition for retailers for the purpose of picking up some new suppliers. I wish I had picked up VD instead and I am allergic to penicillin. After three years of association I was getting totally dissatisfied with my own store. From day one, I had been fed the party line: “You have to have a POS.” That is a point of sale system that integrates your sales (via scanning purchases) with your inventory so you know what is selling and when to reorder. The second insidious thought being planted was that I was not making enough money by carrying products that are relatively rare, low markup and slow movers. I was not good enough to belong to their $250,000.00 a year plus group. Yes, that is what many of the stores no longer in business were clearing. And then they hit me up side the head with the Secret and obviously because I was not as profitable as they were, I was not as spiritual. There was something wrong with my religion, my philosophy and adding insult to injury, I was running into a streak of bad luck.
Several things happened at once. I managed to get a POS almost free and started implementing it instead of my paper and pencil system. Within a month, I was so far behind getting merchandise on the floor, don’t even mention the web, that one shipment or a good sneeze and the EMT’s would have digging me out from under it. If I had a staff to do the entering like Walmart does, I could have used this system. So I returned to paper and pencil. I can see what I need to reorder. There is nothing in the shop I can’t see from the counter. I found I was really missing my suppliers and salespeople. Maybe I have been known to take the afternoon off and look at merchandise. Maybe I do give my supplies coffee and welcome them in the door rather than demanding they make an appointment after hours and give them a half an hour before I throw them out. I even let my customers look at their wares while they are there. BUT, we were all enjoying ourselves. Maybe I wasn’t making the big bucks but I was eating, the cats were eating and we were happy.
Then the last nail in the coffin was the Secret. I went out and bought a copy retail. After watching it twice I concluded I had somehow been sold the trailer for the movie so I asked a friend to bring her copy over that she was gushing about so I could compare them. Unfortunately they were identical. “What the Bleep?” is ten times the movie. I refused to carry it. I was pressured worse than if I has stepped onto a used car lot with money hanging out of my pocket and a dumb look on my face. Well, let me just say, the stores that made the product what it became were screwed royally by the manufacturers. There wasn’t any spirituality in that group. Heck, they weren’t even nice. But they sure made a few people rich. But by then, the Secret had proliferated worse than the H1N1 virus. At least there is a vaccine for it. Suddenly, the measure of your spirituality was your income, how new your car was, how much property you owned and so forth. “New Age Spirituality” had an entrance requirement of over a quarter a mill a year and a constant one-upmanship of what wonderful thing I attracted this week. One disaster, not matter how minor, and rather than your new found friends rallying around you, buying you a drink and giving you a shoulder to cry on, they ran like rats deserting a sinking ship.
Unfortunately for us pagans, we started with nothing and still have most of it. Janice’s personal rebellion happened when the suggestion I take out a huge loan turned into pressure and you never pressure a Scotsman to take out a loan. Why would I replace all my industrial shelving with expensive fixtures? They both hold the product. No one is buying the shelves. I was not changing my inventory to “trendy” because my customers are not trendy. No offense to anyone with that statement. You have your own style and you are happy with it and thus, so am I.
That was when I had something proved to me that I learned many years ago. No one can validate you or your beliefs. You are the only person who can do that. Success is measured in happiness and contentment, not dollars. If you aren’t happy, it isn’t because you aren’t good enough, you aren’t rich enough, you aren’t skinny enough, you aren’t lucky enough or you aren’t anything enough. It’s because you don’t like you. There is no religion, philosophy, technical device, TV show, 5 minutes of fame or amount of money that is going to fix that for you. Only you can fix that and it requires no money, no devotion and no latest anything. What it requires is taking the focus off YOU and putting on others. Your job, your house, your car, your business are not lacking; you are. It is not the position you hold but what you do with that position. There is nothing in this world that you can buy or make, that will give you as much joy as making someone else happy and being happy with them. You can write a hundred checks to an equal number of charities and it won’t feel as good as handing a sandwich to someone on the street. And if they are really hungry, they are going to grab that sandwich. There is no hairstyle or amount of surgery or makeup that will improve your appearance like a smile, even if you have no teeth, and knowing you are making a difference in something’s life.
So yes, I upset you. I make you angry. But I have a hidden agenda, I am making you get to know you. I make you see things you don’t want to see; mainly yourself. I inform often to your detriment. I force you to make choices and even worse, know what those choices really are and there implications. It is soooo much easier to blindly follow, get down on your knees and salute a flag. After a while you trip over the guy in front of you, get really tired of the view, your knees go bad and your arms get tired. At some point you wonder why you are there. But I never tell you to join me, follow me or emulate me. That is a road no one wants to take and I do not blame you. Anyway, I get nervous when large groups of people are behind me……By the way…..George and I were the only people voting tonight and from the way they welcomed us, the only people they had seen in a long while and no one arrived after us. PI….TI……FUL. Well, if Ted loses tonight, by the end of the week a lot of people thinking they are going to get help will know the implications.
Let me explain why we needed this election. I signed a petition, in fact, several, that were forwarded to Congress. I received my first answer in the form of a letter last week. It informed me that until I had a duly elected Congressperson I had no voice in anything Congress was doing. I could try to get in touch with the Speaker of the House who was now my representative by default. My views were now useless. Please address my next letter to the garbage can……get the message????
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