Rest beside the weary road

Don’t stop dreaming, because there is nothing wrong in wanting more.  (unknown)

Over the years, my husband and I have amused ourselves (evidently it’s amusing somehow, since we keep repeating it) by engaging in a kerfuffle regarding his assertion that I always want “more.”  Usually this is in response to my sprightly remarks about when we’re gonna get on the road again, since indeed I do seem to have an insatiable wanderlust.

Now although I will have to admit to being a little slow off the mark sometimes, it does not escape my attention that this ploy on his part is a clever bit of gamesmanship, since I am immediately chagrined and taken aback at being confronted with my greedy self, the (oh, no!) part of me that is never satisfied, always nagging, wanting more, more, MORE. And so, I shut up, or whine and feel sorry for my poor self, who, after all, had fantasies of traveling all the time in her retirement, and I slink into either surly guilt or whiny martyrdom, and keep my mouth shut, even though I do indeed still want more.

But, in defense of MORE, and at the risk of indulging my own ugly self-righteousness, I have to say that my husband is right.  I do want more — more kindness, caring, compassion, justice . . . more common sense and reason — a different world!  Yes!  But since I can hear myself getting a tad out of control, I will reluctantly crawl down offa my soapbox, and try to find some balanced perspective here . . .

A greater or additional amount or degree of, “more” . . .  Such a simple word to be the focus of so much nonsense on the parts of me ‘n my husband and  maybe the parts of lotsa folks right now, a world of people still reeling as we face an unprecedented time of global pandemic and fear, of political strife and transformation, and a struggle for justice as each of us sees it.  A hard place to be.

I want more.  You want less.  I want less.  You want more.  The difficult word seems not to be “more” or “less,” but rather “want,” a mighty fine word as far as I’m concerned, meaning good things like desiring, craving, yearning, but I reckon in the end, it’s what we actually DO with that WANT, that wish, that dream . . .

I hope my oh-so-astute readers will detect not only my tongue-in-cheek, but also my deep wish or ‘want’ for us to recognize that indeed in the end we all want the same things — to survive, to be warm and fed and safe — to be “seen,” understood, loved, affirmed.  It might sound trite, but I really like that phrase I hear repetitively on commercials now:  we’re all in this together.

Wisdom sits in places.  (Apache proverb)

There’s something magic about these predawn hours.  They can be hours of brilliant speculation (I hope a smile hovered on your lips as you read that) or dark imaginings.  They remind me of “thin places,” those special places in the world that seem to carry a sense of mystery and awe about them.  Thin places is a Celtic Christian term for those places where the distance between heaven and earth seems to collapse.  Often thin places seem to exist where one ecosystem meets another, where, for instance,  “the river meets the almighty sea.”  Don’t those very words give you a sense of awe and reverence?

There is a place like that on our farm, where a tiny stream emerges from the woods and trickles into the creek that wanders through our property.  That shadowed opening is covered with thick vines and leaves and moss that create a veil across the opening and carries such a sense of mystery for me, as if just out of the corner of my eye, I might catch a glimpse of something hovering . . .  On my walks, as I pass by this place on the trail, I always stop and bow, thanking God for the Smallness, the “everything else” in my life that I usually never even stop to think about.

And “under the Christmas tree” is another such place . . . Ask any child.  Not only do magical gifts appear from some jolly old elf, but maybe other things we don’t expect . . . Insights.  Awarenesses.  Laughter.  Memories.  Answers.  And maybe things that we don’t usually think to be grateful for, fears and anger and pain that make us wiser.  Our cats, who often seem to sense things that we don’t, love to nest under there.  And Ole Hank always checks, every morning, just in case . . .  And I always wonder what his nose is telling him . . .  I somehow think it’s not just about the possibility of a stray chocolate that might have escaped but about unseen presences as well.

I will miss the tree when I take it down.  Every year the room always seems emptier when I remove it, bereft somehow.  A place of Mystery is gone, the commonplace has returned, the “world (that) is too much with us” is back, where “getting and spending, we lay waste our powers” . . .

And this year?  Every morning as I’ve settled down in this space with my morning coffee, words have been waiting for me, flowing out from under the tree . . .

Maybe thin places (and thin times, for that matter!) exist everywhere, but we are too “thick” to perceive them.

And maybe this year I’ll leave the Christmas tree up for awhile.

Strange, isn’t it? Each man’s life touches so many other lives. And when he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?

Oh, hot dog.

(quotes from It’s a Wonderful Life)

Christmas morning, 2020, 4 a.m.

This is the 12th and final day of my musings under the Christmas tree, or at least my blogged ones.  I wonder sometimes why I have chosen to do this.  To have a sense of connection, perhaps, in the midst of our chosen isolation.  I have received some very dear notes from friends who have read them, and they have meant so much.  Thank you.

Sending these reflections out into the world has not been because I felt anyone needed to read them.  I really do believe we teach most what we need to learn, so perhaps I needed to say them more than you needed to read them.  More than anything, I reckon, they have been a window into my own heart and soul, a picture of my fears and longings and hopes, and provided a wished-for sense of connection.

I wish everyone a wonderful Christmas Day, whatever that might mean for you.  Yet one more time, I cried over the film It’s a Wonderful Life last night, and allowed myself to believe in the magic.  Imagination can be more real than believing you “know” if you let yourself go there.  For 40 years, I have had a framed quote hanging at eye level in my bathroom:  to know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything.  I needed to read that a lot, I guess.

So — if we can never really know, believe in what gives you hope!

All of which is to say I wish for each of you an angel named Clarence or Joe or Florence, just like Jimmy Stewart had in It’s a Wonderful Life, who, in the midst of pain and despair, will tell you in no uncertain terms just how valuable your life is.  Merry Christmas!

Vigil:  a period of keeping awake during time usually spent in sleep, a night-watch, often spent in prayer; taking place the eve before a holy day in the Christian church.  A time of waiting.  (Wikapedia)

This Christmas Eve morning, it is 44 degrees and raining with purpose.  My handy weather warning talks about a flood watch.  Hank made it six steps onto the porch before deciding he didn’t need to pee and heading back in to his warm bed.  But from my vantage point on the sofa underneath the Christmas tree, the lights in the darkness are comforting, and the aroma of French Roast sharp and pungent.

We drove around last night to see the Christmas lights.  I couldn’t remember when I had last been out and about after dark — maybe nine months or more.  As always, the lights were very beautiful, and their symbolism of lighting the way for something sacred and mysterious to be born within us reassuring.  But interestingly enough, I experienced something akin to what it is like when I remove my hearing aides and sounds become gentled and muffled, softer, with less of an imperative to be fully present — the sights were like that last night, softer, muffled, shadowed somehow . . . perhaps because there is another presence about in the collective this year, muffling the light.  Or at least in me . . .

Today we will eat fish.  I think I’ve described elsewhere in these pages. that my mother was one who never met a superstition or religious custom she didn’t like, many of which were throwbacks to what she called the Old Country.  She was definitely one to cover her bases in terms of honoring the powers-that-be, so our growing up was an experience ranging from half-wild paganism to traditional conservative “shoulds and oughts,” which delighted me, but dismayed my more down to earth sister.  All of which is to say that we always had seafood on Christmas Eve, usually oysters, plentiful and cheap in those days, to honor the Feast of the Seven Fishes customs, I reckon (look it up on Wikapedia!), although we had never heard of it.  At any rate, I am not one to mess about with offending powers-that-be, either, so baked cod it will be, since oysters seem far away.

My spiritual tradition is not Catholic, but in attending church with my Cajun Catholic husband, my favorite service would be the Christmas Eve vigil, when the darkened church would be hushed and safe, but deeply mysterious — amidst candlelight and poinsettias and old incense, the sense of ‘waiting’ was palpable . . .

Weather.  Lights in the darkness.  Fish.  A vigil.  A time of waiting.  The unknown . . .

(An interesting aside — my ‘weather alert’ just flashed on the computer screen, “wild two days ahead.”)

It is not a time of ‘Knowing” now.  The Light is not crystal clear, piercing the darkness.  The weather, the rain, the natural world (perhaps read ‘viruses’ here), determinedly makes itself known and shapes our individual and collective behavior if we move in rhythm with it.  It does not seem like a time to force thinking into either/or splits, to pretend we know when we don’t, to be dogmatic in our thinking.

Keep a vigil.  Wait, pray.  Eat fish, whatever that may symbolically mean to you, to honor the sacred, the Mystery, the natural world.  And may it be an active waiting for you, with your only Knowing the assurance that there IS something . . .  And in that Knowing may there be peace and reassurance.

Christmas Eve.  We wait for Santa.  For the Christ Child.  For the Light.  For Something . . .

May it (the gift) be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out.  (Tolkien)

Every Christmas about this time, my sister fishes out a dog-eared and food-stained copy of a beloved book from our childhood called The Substitute Guest by Grace Livingston Hill, published in the 1920s.  It is a simple love story, but it has a description of an iconic Christmas Eve and Christmas Day that we both know by heart.  A lawyer on his way to a house party gets stranded in the country in the midst of a blizzard.  He finds his way to a farmhouse, where he finds the family gathered there in the midst of a crisis.  They, too, while preparing for a house party, and waiting for their guests (who never arrive, by the way, hence the “Substitute Guest”, get it?), learn that a critically ill old lady living up on the mountain must receive her medicine or die, and the family’s son is bundling up in order to hike up the mountain in the gathering dusk and blizzard to take it to her.  Of course our intrepid lawyer/substitute guest goes with him, and after a harrowing trip up and down the mountain, stumbling about half-frozen in the dark in mega-sized snow drifts, they successfully make it back.  And the perfect Christmas ensues.

What always amazed me as a child is that both the family and their unexpected guest were able to fish out of a hidden stash somewhere the absolutely perfect gifts to put under the family Christmas tree for each other.  Which is probably why to this day I have a drawer upstairs (just like our family in the book) full of possible gifts.  But alas, I have never had an unexpected guest who could make use of ’em.

All of which brings me to gifts and how we choose them.  There are the “useful” variety (socks and gloves and kitchen spatulas); the “this-is-what-I-would-like-to-receive” kind (for me, this would be promissory notes for foot massages and back rubs and lovely candlelit dinners prepared by someone else, and trips to anticipate and — oops, this is not about me.  Altho’ I will have to confess to giving all of these to my loved ones in the past, most of which have gone uncollected); the sort that is what we project the other person would just love to have but are in probability what you want for them (sexy lingerie, read a spouse gift here; the “perfect” item of clothing or personal care item that the recipient would never choose but you know that they really should be wearing or using); and at last, the really rare “perfect” gift, when the recipient is “seen” (I won’t go into what examples of those are — you either know or you don’t).

I have indulged myself in giving all these types of gifts in the past, maybe even occasionally happening upon the ‘truly seeing’  kind (altho’, again, I will admit to being terribly chagrined and dismayed at times when I thought I was giving the other person exactly what they wanted and it became apparent, no matter how gracious the recipient was, that it was way low on their wishlist).

(I could do a parenthetical comment here about “ugly capitalist Americans” who write blogs about such trivial and decadent largesse when most of the world is hungry and wanting and how we should be giving to charity. instead and the absolute ludicrous nature of what Christmas has become.  But I won’t.  At Christmas, I am a, however ugly, traditionalist).

Gold, frankincense, and myrrh . . .  Don’tcha bet Mary and Joseph in the Christmas Story got a bundle for those first gifts?  I hope so.  I hope it got ’em safely home, and kept ’em in food and carpentry supplies for years.

And I hope whatever you find in your stockin’ or under the tree is either what you (truly) “always wanted” or that it can be recycled or turned in for a bundle, too.

Why do you linger at this fork in the road rubbing your eyes?  (Richard Powers)

In your Christmas prayers this year, say a prayer for the wind, and the water, and the wood, and those who live there, too.  (from John Denver)

There was a long low bank of clouds to the southwest last evening, and so as Jupiter and Saturn whizzed by each other, no “Christmas star” was apparent.  But I saw it in my heart.  Don’t quite know what it would have meant for me to actually see it, other than perhaps its being a lovely symbol of new possibilities, new beginnings.

Perhaps it is only a further indication of my wish for an exciting new “project,” something absorbing in which to invest my creative energy.  A journey waaayyyy across the mountains and deserts to find a newborn king would probably do the trick.  I wonder what those Three Wise Men talked about as they lumbered along on the backs of those ubiquitous camels . . .   And how many companions they had along to protect them, because how come nobody ripped off all that pricey gold, frankincense, and myrrh . . .  The story could have really done with a little more detail.  But I guess it wasn’t about the wise men.  They were only bit players.

But they weren’t bit players to themselves.  This was their life!  Each was the star of the show in his own story.  Perhaps, like me, they were getting along a bit, and struggling with retirement, and needed something compelling to do.  Like ole Odysseus, who, after all his wild and crazy adventures at sea, in his “old age” was given a final task of carrying an oar inland to those people who had never seen one.

???

Aside from a ridiculous mixing up of stories, what’s that about, ole girl???

My so-called projects during these nine months (and counting) of pandemic “quarantine” have been myriad, but one of them has been to increase my walking fitness.  I set a seemingly impossible goal for myself of being able to do ten miles at a stretch, as I could do (not easily!) at one point in my life.  I am now up to three and a half miles, and seem pretty stuck.  I even have a “walking circle” in my house, 100 steps, around and around, that I do in bad weather.

Aside from wearing a groove in the pine floors, developing prodigious calf muscles (at least for me), and dropping some weight from my chubby frame, has walking in circles around my house really been a project comparable to following a Christmas star?

I reckon we all do the best we can.  Walking in circles just doesn’t seem to have the same cache that carrying an oar inland or following a star does, but I’ll deep doin’ it ’til something else presents itself.

Perhaps there are those of us just not meant to be in a story of mythic proportion.  Or, on the other hand, perhaps all stories are of mythic proportion.  I’ll just betcha ole Odysseus, when told to carry that oar, said,  “you gotta be kidding.”

So I’ll keep walking in circles.  And praying . . .

I don’t know if you believe in Christmas, or if you have presents underneath the Christmas tree.  But if you believe in love, that will be more than enough . .

It’s in every one of us to be wise.  Find your heart, open up both your eyes.  We can all know everything without ever knowing why.  It’s in every one of us, by and by . . .  (from John Denver)

It is Solstice.  Winter is arriving within this hour, even as I write.  As I settled down under the Christmas tree to write in the predawn darkness, I briefly checked my email, and received two dear and touching letters from friends that made me cry.  If they are reading this, thank you.  You made me feel less alone.

“The darkness drops again.  But centuries of stony sleep were wakened by a rocking cradle.  And what rough beast, his hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born. . .”   Without looking it up, this is how I remember the haunting words in Yeats’s poem, one that he wrote in the aftermath of the First World War and in the midst of the 1918-1919 flu pandemic as his pregnant wife lay critically ill.

Those words always come back to me as associated with the Solstice darkness somehow.  The eeriness of similarity in societal conditions is especially striking this year with our current pandemic and unsettledness.  What we in our Christian perspective have come to call a Divine Birth really did “rock” the world.  Historical figures estimate that the defense of Christianity has been responsible for as many as 80-100 million deaths over the centuries, and on the other side of the coin, it is estimated by some counts that there are over 100,000 Christian martyrs every year in our present day world.

Regardless of the accuracy of these devastating statistics, surely, if only a fraction of it is true, we can do better than this.

My sister and I were speaking of brilliant scientist and scholar Stephen Hawking yesterday over tea.  And in our attempt to understand even a fragment of his work, speculating on the probability of life elsewhere in our universes . . .  Certainly, but not life as we would ever know it, according to Hawking.  We went so far into the realm of possibilities that we were even imagining another planet “peopled” with viruses such as Covid as the primary intelligent life form.  And if so, come to our planet Earth to finish us off before we destroy everything millennia have created on this beautiful planet?  The stuff of which science fiction is made, but just maybe . . .

Dark mutterings for tea, but highly appropriate for Solstice.  We CAN do better than this.  Please.  Tonight is the highly anticipated Jupiter Saturn “Christmas Star” conjunction.  Wise Men possibly followed that same “star” two thousand years ago to honor a new beginning, a new possibility . . .

It’s in every one of us to be wise . . .

A good laugh heals a lot of hurts. — (Madeleine L’Engle)

At the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities. — (Jean Houston)

And keep a sense of humor. It doesn’t mean you have to tell jokes. If you can’t think of anything else, when you’re my age, take off your clothes and walk in front of a mirror. I guarantee you’ll get a laugh. — (Art Linkletter)

This morning under the Christmas tree, I reached for the gift of laughter.  Sweet, gentle amusement.  Rollicking belly laughs.  Great loud guffaws.  Helpless gasping heehaws.  Rolling childlike giggles.  Loud chortles and soft chuckles.  Hearty cackles of pleasure.

No snickers or snorts or titters or eye rolling or sarcastic commentary, please, in my gift.  Just the pure, unrestrained pleasure of laughter.  A bit of gentle satire directed towards my own beloved eccentricities is acceptable, since after all, pleasure in one’s own foibles is a gift from God.

My favorite-est thing to do, to have, in all the world is spontaneous laughter.  In whatever heaven may be, I’ll bet there will be laughter rolling and reverberating about.  Music of the gods.

That’s how I know there will be animals in heaven.  They offer us such an enormous well of possibilities for humor in just being who they are.  Maybe my under-the-tree package could have a few animals in it, too.  Especially goats.  Goats are funny.

My second best thing in all the world are animals.  Why I didn’t become an animal something or other instead of a person shrink is beyond me.

I always said I married my first husband because he made me laugh.  What a precious gift.  For a long time after he died, I thought I would never laugh again.  But I did, and in that laughter, he is here.

And so, on this morning, I reach for humor of only the best and non-hurtful kind.  And knowing that each of our senses of humor is very different, I wish that for you as well, in whatever form it takes for you.  And if you are not at a place where that is yet possible for you, wait patiently.  It will come.  Everything is seasonal.

Trappings:  the outward features, roles or objects associated with a particular situation, role, or thing . . .  The symbols . . .  (Wikapedia)

I love all the trappings of Christmas, from Rudolph to the Salvation Army’s bells and kettle.  The tinkling sounds, the spicy aromas, the sugary tastes, the sparkle and the lights in the darkness, the sacred and the secular . . .

And this year is no different.  Except now the beauty is viewed through a film of tears, as in the Christmas tree pictured above.  Tears for the world.  For myself.  For us all.  For all the loss and pain and fear and uncertainty.

And it is my hope that we are each honoring those personal losses as well, with some kind of acknowledgment of grief, whatever form that may take for you right now.  This extraordinary time in which we find ourselves has created loss, or at least delays, of so many different varieties, from the excruciatingly painful loss of a loved one or our own personal health and well-being to the loss of income, routine, ways of being and relating to each other . . .

The hardest lesson that I ever learned is that grief will eventually lead to new life if we can stay with it until we have moved through it and beyond it.

And maybe that’s what the Christmas story is really all about.  Rudolph and the Salvation Army and Santa weren’t there on that hard night two thousand years ago.  It was raw pain and fear and darkness . . .  And grief.  A story about a young girl giving birth pretty much alone, in dirty, primitive surroundings, supposedly aware that the son to whom she was giving birth would be subjected to a devastating death in the end.  Not a pretty story, no matter how much we’ve cleaned it up, and surrounded it with trappings.

As in all good stories, there was redemption and new life in the end.  But it. was only made possible because the characters in the story lived the hard part fully.

Stay with where you are now.