Hudson Valley Astrologer

“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.”

~ Helen Keller

Covid was running rampant and people were just beginning to get involved in #Solidarity8 to cheer healthcare workers. Life was surreal.

My son drove back from California and stayed with us. Not his ideal career move but things were shut down and L.A. was getting scary without a job and fewer prospects.

When he arrived we decided to cook together, and among other things tackle a sore spot over the garage that was wreaking havoc below. When it rained the water found its way through the mushy plywood, eventually puddling up on the cement floor. Not good!

We ripped off the roof and patched it up. I thought a little tar would do the trick, but we ended up replacing four pieces of plywood, repapering and then nailing the shingles in place. We did it! With a little help from YouTube of course, but the coolest thing about the experience is that neither one of us had ever done anything like that before. We were up there for three weeks, sweltering underneath what Eddie Vedder called The Big Hot Sun.

Whenever we do something new with someone else, there is an extraordinary interplay between what we SEE and think and what they SEE and think. Sometimes the SEEING is askew and the thoughts are jumbled. But when we listen to each other and leave ourselves open to learn, we can let our thoughts go, and allow ourselves to SEE things a little differently.

It worked! Or we worked! Together! Don’t get me wrong. We were at times prepared to throw each other off the roof! But this how relationships go. The important thing is to SEE. SEE how the task or problem ahead of is laid out. Then, the artful task of communicating what is SEEN so that there is a mutual UNDERSTANDING of not only the task or problem ahead but also a way through to resolving, fixing, and making repairs.

We had a little taste of this again last night in the garage, where I was working on a much smaller project with my daughter. She is getting married in April and wants to build an arched backdrop to hold a display when people come into the venue so that they’ll know where they’re sitting. We could of course just buy it but what fun would that be?

Off to Home Depot we go to pick up a few things we might need after watching an Instagram video. Plywood, 1×5 clear pine boards for the shelves, and screws. Oh, and from my experience I’m convinced that the plywood won’t fit in back of the Outback, but she’s incredulous (inexperienced) about it. “No way!”, she says. We do fit the board in the back but only because we had it trimmed to 7’ and pushed the seats all the way up. She had to drive home because my knees couldn’t get past the steering wheel. I sat sideways in the passenger seat watching the back because we had to leave the gate open and listen to the incessant ding ding ding all the way home that told us a door was ajar. We laughed the whole way.

Unfortunately, my “workshop” isn’t equipped with the tools and gizmos that populate the set of a Kevin O’Connor episode on This Old House. I use my circular saw for everything. But a jig saw would no doubt have made life much easier.

There we were surveying the boards with our pencils behind our ears and strategizing. I’m really a financial astrologer, preoccupied with things like the Aries Vortex so dubbed by a well known analyst (Ray Merriman). She is an anesthesiologist probably thinking, “how hard can this be? It isn’t like it’s a life or death situation!” She’s always been handy, and has a pretty mauve toolkit we gave her one year that she’s carried with her everywhere. Little Miss Fixit in college. But we never tackled anything like this before.

Again, something new. No expert present. Perhaps one person with a little more experience with the saws-all, but that’s it. We made stuff up as we went and then saw videos afterward suggesting we did precisely what recommended, but thought we invented. There’s nothing new under the Sun, eh?

As on the roof, the act of SEEING, being SEEN, and UNDERSTANDING fell into place. However, our progress stalled as we suddenly hit a stumbling block. We needed a third person.

Just then my son walked through the door. We were having an issue getting the wood screws to grab and pull the shelving tight to the plywood. Instead, it kept pushing the wood apart. We couldn’t get enough leverage on the boards to hold them tight enough to the plywood to reverse the process of separation so that the pieces would come together, and join seamlessly. With my son’s help I could focus on operating the drill. My daughter could focus on aligning the pilot holes, and he could focus on stabilizing the board putting pressure on it to prevent it from beveling out, closing the space between the plywood and shelving so that the screws would grab hold and do the rest — pull the parts together. Walla! The wood screws grabbed hold and pulled the shelving tight to the plywood.

My son is an artist! But he’s been trying to make his way in the “new economy” by taking various sales jobs and project management positions. After a failed start-up he’s been licking his wounds before hitting reset, but the so called “new economy” has gone into warp speed and is quickly morphing into something out of a Robert Heinlein or Isaac Asimov book. Finding work is a problem for a certain segment of educated white collar workers. The more adaptable ones of this cohort, or ones who discovered early on that they were being displaced, switched gears and learned a trade — plumbers, electricians, carpenters and furniture makers. The issue is only going to get worse, as people who are being eliminated from the government payroll are about to discover. There is a growing economic vulnerability as a digital steamroller comes through government departments brandishing a chainsaw, displacing people with automation and robots, leaving people behind, in the name of progress.

Times like these require us not only to SEE the task or the problem in front of us, “the hole in the roof”, or “the backdrop” waiting to be assembled by a family of apprentices, the wood, the nails and screws, the tools at hand, etc., all just things we use or make. What we most need to SEE is each other, with humility, and UNDERSTANDING that the capabilities we bring to any situation are vast and wonderful. There are rare times when miraculous moments occur, when we’re involved in doing simple things. These aren’t the “buzzer beater” moments with no time left on the clock during the championship game in The March Madness Tournament. No! More often a miracle moment is sometimes a simple, humble thing. Like when people come together, like two pieces of wood pulled tight and joined seamlessly in a display of unity and common effort.

HVA

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