Last Quarter

 This morning, awakening before 3 am as usual, but instead of lying in bed letting thoughts cascade through my mind in the dark, I rise and go to kitchen where I reheat a big mug of coffee left over from the day before. I feel like my grandfather doing this---reheating coffee. The mug is comfortably hot when I remove it from the microwave, intercepting it before the end of the timer so as to avoid the harsh beeping in the dark.

Today is the last quarter Moon. At this hour it is still too high to see out the window. It must be directly over head, I tell myself. This Moon has taught me so much, I feel, propelling me and carrying me forward and downstream along some path that is both personal and impersonal. 

Having risen so early I can indulge with leisure in the dark pre-dawn hours with the space heater delivering hot air around my ankles. I can and meditate. 

I reflect on the show from yesterday (link). It was fun and relaxed, one of my favorites so far. The audience seemed to like it more than usual. The main topic was a rather whimsical one, talking about the President at the Daytona 500 stock car race last weekend, and comparing it to five years ago when he was also there. I knew the audience would enjoy it, and they did.

After that I spent much of the show looking at the issue of whether an asteroid is going to hit the earth a little less than eight years from now in December 2032. Some astronomers in Chile discovered right after Christmas and the more data they gather on its orbit, the odds of it striking Earth have increased. I dug a little and provided the audience with some perspective on it. Turns out its not a planet killer and might well do no damage even if it did strike the Earth.

Some of my audience, and myself included, are very suspicious of anything offered as news that is supposed to make us fear and give power to people with grand planet-scale political solutions in mind. Give us power to redesign the political system of the world or else everyone is going to die! I was once an alarmist about such things but years ago I started to see through the fear. It doesn't work well with my audience. They expect me to push back on fear, which I do. 

After every show I always feel embarrassed in some way. But I am also on a high from the contact with the audience, which is a highlight of my week. What a weird thing to do, I think---to sit at my computer and talk into a microphone and have people listen to me and even give me money spontaneously. Do I deserve this? Am I really worth listening to?  Who am I to take up people's time this way? Don't you have better things to do than listen to me? I barely know what I'm doing. Maybe everyone feels that way. It's some kind of impostor syndrome. 

If I could see my audience, it would be different. I cannot see faces. I cannot get that kind of feedback, which I love because it is the essence of the connection you make with others while doing this kind of thing. 

I've begun to feel like I'm at the point where I could handle a bigger audience than have, but maybe I'm fooling myself. I haven't minded the coziness and it has worked for me for now. 

These are the things I think about with the space heater churning out warm air on my ankles in the dark. Soon the day will start in earnest.