Mythic Monday – Rolling Along

There’s often something lacking when I read Native American mythology. Perhaps it’s that that form of mythology uses a different form of logic, perhaps they are fragmentary, or perhaps it’s because the original tellings were oral and participatory and it just doesn’t carry over to the written word. However, once in a while, you get a myth like this:

Why the sun rolls along

Sun was warned by a messenger, “Someone is coming to kill you.”

Soon a person came along and seized the Sun. He threw him toward the East, but Sun came back. He threw him toward the South, but Sun came back. The evil one came toward Sun again, but Sun began to roll along. Sun rolled and rolled and rolled along. He rolls along to this very day.

(From Shasta Indian Tales by Rosemary Holsinger.)

Clearly, there is something missing here. Such myths raise more questions than they answer… but lucky for us, this isn’t a mythology blog, so we can leave the questions alone. The point here is that the sun just keeps on rolling, no matter how the evil person tries to kill him. As with many things, it’s all about persistence.

I’ve had numerous projects in the works for years, and at some point, they just stopped moving forward. Due to a lack of energy on my part and other pressing concerns, progress just ceased. There’s only so much time a day (mostly because Sun keeps on moving), and it’s sometimes not possible to keep everything progressing and something has to stop in order for other things to continue.  Last week, my blog stopped.  I had taken a week of vacation to make some progress on another project.  I had worked up a buffer of blog posts to cover the time I wouldn’t be paying attention to the blog… but I forgot about the post-push resting period.

Ooops.

The nice thing about being a mythic character such as Sun, is that you only have one thing on which to focus.  (Well, two if you count “rolling along” and “being glowy”.)  Here in the real world, we often have too many things going on to “keep on rolling” on more than one.  For me, the one thing that is always 100% consistent is monitoring security posture.  Things change every day.  In fact, just over the weekend, we got reports of an iPhone attack, a discussion on legacy systems, and a revival of an old attack.  Last month, there was a huge amount of malware to keep on top of as well as numerous patches from major vendors.  The threats never stop, so those of us in security have to keep on rolling.

Unfortunately, this means that other things have to be dropped sometimes. But hey, even Sun sometimes takes a day off, so I don’t feel that bad. I’ll just try to pick things back up and get to posting again. Hopefully I won’t miss to many days as I get things running again.