{"id":4915,"date":"2024-12-31T21:23:27","date_gmt":"2025-01-01T01:23:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/thezenpagan\/?p=4915"},"modified":"2025-01-02T09:51:57","modified_gmt":"2025-01-02T13:51:57","slug":"fixing-the-mailbox-a-holiday-omen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/thezenpagan\/2024\/12\/fixing-the-mailbox-a-holiday-omen\/","title":{"rendered":"Fixing the Mailbox: A Holiday Omen"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

A big part of living a magical life, of being a magical person, is working to create meaning out of the scraps that events give you<\/p>\n

So it was that as I prepared for my recent Solstice ritual work<\/a>, I found signs and portents in a home repair task I had to attend to first. I had to repair the mailbox.<\/p>\n

I live in the suburbs, with the mailbox at the curb; and mine is a resin plastic thing anchored to the ground by a wooden stake. Somehow that stake had snapped \u2014 I think some kids playing football in the street the evening before may have run into the mailbox, as whatever had happened had also knocked one of the house number stickers off. And whoever had done it had tried to prop it back up with rocks, but that didn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

So as I prepared for Yule, if I wanted to receive those holiday cards I had to repair the mailbox. I had to put in some real work \u2014 pulling out power tools, sawing and sledge-hammering out in the cold and even a brief snow squall \u2014 to repair the means of communication.<\/p>\n

And that somehow seemed fraught with portent, as I consider the ending of the year and the beginning of another, and the state of the world in general.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been thinking this past week about an incident from around 2005 or so \u2014 when cellphones were not as ubiquitous as they are today. I was at Leadbetter\u2019s Tavern<\/a> on Christmas Eve, or maybe on Christmas night after the family visit. I got talking to the fellow on the barstool next to me, as you do at a bar sometimes. We talked about holidays and family, all that stuff. And somehow we started talking about his estranged daughter and his relationship with her.<\/p>\n

And in that holiday moment, with a few drinks in me, there in that temple of both Dionysus and Apollo, it suddenly seemed to me that the right thing to do was to lend him my phone so he could call her, right there and then. Again, this was back when cellphones were a more rare thing. Giving your phone to some stranger you just met in a bar was an even weirder thing to do then than it would be today.<\/p>\n

But we follow the inscrutable urges of spirit. I handed over my phone, he called his daughter and they chatted for 20 minutes, maybe half an hour. Long enough that it was a real conservation. He gave me the phone back, thanked me, we clinked our drinks in a holiday toast, and went our separate ways.<\/p>\n

Maybe nothing came of it. Maybe it changed their relationship, maybe I touched a Christmas miracle there. I don\u2019t know. I hadn\u2019t thought about that night in many years, but with so little of my own family left this Christmas, it came back to mind.<\/p>\n

Communication seems a theme of the holidays. Consider the tradition of sending holiday cards, trying to keep lines of communication open with people we don\u2019t see much.<\/p>\n

In computer networking, we talk about \u201ckeep-alive\u201d packets in the \u201cTransmission Control Protocol\u201d (or \u201cTCP\u201d, as we call it) that underlies much of the internet, where computers on an idle connection occasionally send bits of data down the line just to signify that they aren\u2019t hanging up on each other. I\u2019ve always thought of holiday cards the same way. The contents of the card aren\u2019t significant, what\u2019s significant is the meta-data: \u201cI want to keep in contact with you.\u201d<\/p>\n

But this contentious election year, I see so many people excited about cutting off communication. So many people talking about \u201cgoing no contact\u201d with family over political arguments, blocking people who supported different candidates, running off to censorious social media bubbles where they won\u2019t have to be exposed to contrary opinions.<\/p>\n

Friends, if you can\u2019t communicate, you can\u2019t work together. If you can\u2019t work together, you can\u2019t solve problems.<\/p>\n

And if you can\u2019t communicate, you can\u2019t change hearts and minds. And if you can\u2019t work with people with whom you disagree and you can\u2019t convert them to agreement, the only way you can relate to them is some sort of power hierarchy \u2014 either you conquer them and make them do what you want, or they conquer you.<\/p>\n

But the SNAFU Principle<\/a> tells us that communication is only possible between equals; so such a power hierarchy only further impedes communication, makes the changing of hearts and minds less possible, and increases the need for authoritarianism.<\/p>\n

This vicious anti-communication circle runs tighter and tighter until it tears itself apart \u2014 another example of the Law of Eristic Escalation: Imposition of Order (via a power hierarchy) = Escalation of Disorder.<\/p>\n

If we\u2019re going to get out of this mess, we\u2019ll only do it by communicating with each other.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

So I\u2019m making that my theme for 2025: communication. I\u2019m going to feed the veve for Papa Legba, opener of the way, when I head out on New Year\u2019s Eve. Let the way be opened, not just between the realm of spirit and the realm of humanity, but within the realm of humanity. Let the way be opened between MAGA Uncle Bob and uber-woke Cousin Alice, between urban coastal elites and people living in flyover country, between the working class and the professional-managerial-academic class, between management and labor.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s fix our mailboxes so we can receive messages from all over. We don\u2019t have to agree with the people sending those messages, but if we\u2019re going to solve our planetary problems, we have to hear the messages.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So I’m making that my theme for 2025: communication. Let the way be opened, not just between the realm of spirit and the realm of humanity, but within the realm of humanity.Let’s fix our mailboxes so we can receive messages from all over. We don’t have to agree with the people sending those messages, but if we’re going to solve our planetary problems, we have to hear the messages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1860,"featured_media":4918,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,23,75,1],"tags":[1528,1525,90],"class_list":["post-4915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-magic-ritual","category-religion-politics","category-seasonal-musings","category-uncategorized","tag-communication","tag-new-year","tag-yule"],"yoast_head":"\nFixing the Mailbox: A Holiday Omen<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"So I'm making that my theme for 2025: communication. Let the way be opened, not just between the realm of spirit and the realm of humanity, but within the realm of humanity.Let's fix our mailboxes so we can receive messages from all over. 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