Oxen

Spring poked her little head out last week and gave us a tease. Kind of strange to get a 60 degree day at the beginning of February. All kinds of surreal goings on—for example, they are giving us these personality tests at work. Someone went to some conference and got religion and now we are all having to do these questionnaires like the ones in the magazines in the grocery store check out line. By answering these questions we will unlock the fundamental secret of our budget challenged universe. This management tool will allow us to look beyond spending freezes, job eliminations, the fact that every single upper level manager took early retirement, and we will reach A Happy Workplace which will allow us to Create the Most Liveable City in America.

Now I am not exactly sure how some scoring system thought up by a bored housewife and her mother back in the middle of the last century is going to do all that, but at this point, I will try anything. Not much else from federal bailouts to pundit prognostication seems to be working. For myself, I am looking at Tarot cards and my Chinese Zodiac. I am a Metal Ox. In a way, I kind of knew that. I am the workhorse, sherpa personality, plugging away until its finally done. It is well and fitting that this is an Ox year. We need all hands on deck, putting their shoulders to the plow. We are going to need all the oxen we can muster. We are in one big pile of pickles and wishing, dreaming and knowing your personality type is not going to dig us out of this one. In addition to an Everest of elbow grease to get our economy out of the crapper, we are going to need no small measure of luck: We need to pull some good cards in this poker game. But I suppose we also need a pocketful of wishes and dreams to give us something to shoot for. And some sort of vision to yank us out of our snowdrifts into a future.

I pulled the Page of Cups while thinking about the economy, and that’s not exactly a hard edged How To practical card. Message from the Universe! Hang on to intuition and childlike wonder! So channel your inner Ox and let’s get cracking!