library visit

I went to the library today. My high speed Internet access was finally shutoff about a week ago and I blew through the remainder of my phone's 2GB bandwidth shopping pellet fired heaters and scrolling through Instagram. Browsing on 2G since has been tempting me to pay for more, but the plan has always been to add regular library visits to my weekly routine, which this inconvenience has been encouraging. It's also been serving as a sort of positive deterrent to reshape my time spent online.

I was so excited to go this morning I arrived twenty minutes before they opened. I used the time to run some errands then returned to do a little work. I think the last time I went to work in an office was January 2020. Next time I might pack a lunch.

I checked out three books while I was there, one on bird watching, one a survey of mythology, and one a cultural history of the Aztecs. Last week I found that one of their gods, Huitzilopochtli, is symbolized wearing hummingbird feathers. By one account, his mother Coatlicue had four hundred sons, the Centzon Huiznahua, and one daughter, Coyolxauhqui, by another god, Mixcoatl, then was impregnated with him by a ball of feathers. Before his birth, his half brothers and sister conspired to kill their mother. On their approach, Huitzilopochtli sprung forth from his mother's womb to decapitate his sister and chase away his brothers. The siblings became identified with the stars and moon, and he with the son, everyday rising to chase them away. Apparently the Aztecs would make blood offerings to him to strengthen him for his work, sacrificing prisoners of war to the cause.

So Huitzilopochtli has become an idol in my war against the mosquitoes in the backyard. It seems the festival for him would have aligned around November or December, which works out perfectly for the end of the fall season here. I think I'll put away the bird bath then before the frost, and in its stead have space to start a fire in the Dutch oven, in which I can make burnt offerings of the mosquitoes captured in the trap by the rain barrel, in a pyre lined with sage and anise hyssop. That will be a sacrifice of some of the surplus produced in the summer to sustain his spirit through the long dark of winter. In the spring I might repeat the ritual, rendering my own blood letting as the offering, a preseason dedication of myself to the garden to curry his favor and waken the hummingbird army. For added measure I've ordered a nectar feeder that I'll raise at the same time. I've been making monthly donations to the library, which feels especially personal now that they're partly my Internet service provider, and I think these rituals will be times to tithe to the Mexican cultural center as well.