Month: December 2023

At Full Moon Cottage, this final week before Christmas feels temperate and calm. I think our willingness to listen, pay attention, and be present to ourselves and each other has greatly improved our enjoyment of this wonderful season over our years together. We’ve slowed down, honoring our choices regarding how we’ll use our time and energy. 

Not that it hasn’t taken decades to ingrain these practices, but to look back and see we’ve evolved beyond our younger, more frenetic holiday rhythms is gratifying.

Time’s pace speeds up as we age; the long anticipation of events that childhood seemed to prolong vanishes, and the past accrues the bulk of our lives in the blink of an eye. The velocity of passing days may reduce our ability to distinguish one from the next. The future—all those attractive enticements, important goals, and necessary appointments planned out on our calendars—stampedes toward us with maniacal haste, rushing headlong over our present days to join our growing memories, which themselves begin to feel unsorted and nondescript. Life can flatten a bit, and we yearn for the magical sparks that shot through the days of our childhood, making each shine with its specific enchantments.

I am a creature of routine. Organizing my hours and days and marshaling them to reach goals, accomplish tasks, create and cross jobs off lists, and establish a known and reliable rhythm to keep my existence humming the tune I’d composed for it, seemed a key part of my life’s essence from a very early age. 

The discipline and intellectual challenges of Catholic schooling may have elicited this military approach to my relationship with the time given me, or perhaps my tight scheduling of how I could “best” use my energy fed familial, or my own original addictions to control, to please, to gain recognition, to be loved.

But I remember my parents gently trying to curb my pursuit of busy perfection and rigid routine, so I suspect these tendencies came nestled in my being at birth, integral to my own my original blessings, thorns, and teachers. We arrive, it seems, with our own lessons in hand, and then spend a lifetime growing or diminishing our spirits according to the choices we make to live from our particular shadows or light.

Using one’s skills to accomplish goals, to serve, to bring order to one’s life and greater communities is a gift, of course, in many ways. Aimlessness is not a fruitful or recommended path in life. My own inclinations to organize, control, and achieve, however, weren’t always or even primarily driven by self-love or equanimity, but by a panicked sense of deficit and the poison of unearned guilt. Mostly, I think I was driven by fear. 

I moved and changed schools 5 times by the end of 6th grade, which made me quite adept at burying myself until I figured out who people wanted me to be, afraid of rejection, afraid of being the smart girl, of beating boys in races, of making mistakes, of being excluded and friendless.

Fear of being judged, or receiving a poor review, of being shamed for a failure to exceed expectations…these don’t create a path to healthy self-acceptance or an embracing tolerance of one’s very human limitations. Instead, they create stress and illness.

And chaining our energy to relentless doing, especially fueled by fear, makes a life pass quickly, constantly chasing the vanishing future, missing the once-in-a-lifetime miracles of now, this moment, its music, light, shadow, and invitations to notice and deepen. We lose the wonder of childhood, that vital magical aspect of ourselves we must retain for times like these, when new questions must be asked and authoritarians challenged. Someone brave as a child has to point out the Emperor has no clothes.

Gradually, life lessons, losses, conscious choices and earnest self-reflection taught me how to pursue the sacred practices of balance, of gentleness, of letting go, of listening, of lightness, of an openness to life as it will come, without my need to corral my days into productivity and list-elimination. I am still learning.

My partner in reclaiming life’s delight, in rediscovering each day’s specific enchantments and allowing them time and space to shine, in loosening or tightening life’s rhythm in service to our healing and wholeness, has made all the difference in my life’s trajectory. I’m deeply grateful for the gift of his presence in my life, and that of the 4-leggeds and other beloveds, human and winged, rooted, and finned, teachers all, and each a Messenger who has brought me invitations to grow in ways I hadn’t imagined, and brought vivid sparks back to my days. 

How do we fuel peace in our hearts, especially during this holy season of breathing out what needs release from the past year and breathing in the questions, peace, and sacred stamina for the next? In a world so noisy with hatred, greed, and fear, how do we rest in winter’s shelter and grow our joyful energy for a new round of seasons? How do we set down our fears, judgements, feelings of scarcity and unworthiness to live in the abundance of possibility each moment offers?

I’ve been thinking about the role and power we give to Yes and No throughout our lives, about unexpected Messengers with life-changing invitations, and how those can lead to world-changing results. If more people gave weight to their discernment of issues requiring their Yes or No, would the world be facing the troubles it is?

What a gift in these dark days, to have the celebration of Christmas, to dance again with the startling metaphor of Yes, the life-changing, world-changing assent offered by a young woman—a girl, really—confronted by a strange, frightening Messenger, who brought an invitation so unexpected and astonishing that logic and fear would lead most of us to reject it outright, turn from it, refocus on the safe drudgery of sameness, do our repeated tasks and cross them off the list leading us to our death (in every sense the word).

Nothing about the Christmas story makes sense; all of it is a mystery that holds great joy and deep love, resilience, and the persistence to endure the darkness, birthing our inborn light and capacity to love more than we hate. We are all poor and unmoored together; we need each other for safe harbor, for sustenance, for the wealth and magic created by our combined gifts, for celebrations to happen and matter under stars blazing brighter than anyone’s power to make us fearful.

What a gift to hang lights, sing beautiful music, offer and receive presents, celebrate the birth of a Jewish babe born to a family living in what we call Palestine, to recognize again the essential human act of moving across false barriers to form relationship, to renew our belief that the greatest gift of life is that it allows us to change, to evolve, and to love: across all impediments, through our flaws, around our differences, over our fears, and straight into light.

May we say No to those who tell us to give up on the world and each other, to our own fears’ repetition of our failures, imperfections, and unworthiness. 

And let us say Yes to our beloved Messengers (and be one to others); may we always be open to those who push us to be ourselves, to slow down, to take holy risks, to let each moment shine with its specific enchantments. Let us say Yes to those surprising invitations that startle our hearts and imaginations, trusting that life-changing, world-changing miracles can unfold when we walk into darkness and allow our love to spark fires that blaze as bright as stars.

Say Yes.

Be not afraid.

Joy to your gatherings and moments of solitude this lovely time of year. Give time and blessing to your endings, and dreams, and tender, wild beginnings.

Gentle Peace to your precious lives.

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