Glitter on, Helen . . . (A dear young friend — thanks, Sunny!)
The house has been decorated for Christmas for a week or so, and I never tire of looking at it. Every year I swear I will downsize our decorations, and I never do. I can’t bear to throw away even the most threadbare or tarnished ornament, or bedraggled wreath. The result is a hodgepodge clutter of mismatched decorations from different eras in my life. While it ain’t ever gonna win a prize, it warms my heart.
And it glitters. Shining, sparkling, glowing, giving off light . . . So beautiful . . .
I have always loved glitter. And surprisingly, to me at least, I recently learned that one of the reasons that humans like glitter and glitz is because of our evolutionary instinct to search out water for survival. so we’re always, somewhere in there, looking for shimmer and shine because we gotta hydrate. Go, figure.
Maybe it’s like that in the inner world as well. The metaphoric scent and ‘shine’ of water lures us on, sometimes toward that which is life-giving, sometimes toward destruction. Because after all, old sayings like all that glitters is not gold came from someone else’s painful life-lesson.
So glitter, I reckon, like everything else, has its down-side, no matter how beautiful. When I was much (much) younger, I used to dream of having long shimmering gowns, covered in sequins. When I first saw Mozart’s opera, The Magic Flute, the Queen of the Night’s long, glittering black gown was to die for. But that Queen of the Night was one bad mama.
And alas, never have I owned so much as one sequin.
But in my heart, and my decorations, I glitter on!