christmas revisited

This is a Christmas photo of my dear friend who is 87 and has received a dire prognosis in recent weeks.  Such a pure, clear spirit!  It will be so hard for all of us to lose her.   I'm sure she'll always live in our hearts, but there will be a major space for us in the consensual reality-world without her.

We've had such a sweet christmas this year.  no hoopla, no fanfare.  we've just allowed the spirit of the season to seep into our vessels and suffuse us with warmth, love, and paradoxically a sort of cool clear vision that is peculiar to the winter solstice season imo.  A lovely paradox, that. 

With friends who live around the corner, I went to a lovely candle-light service at our local Episcopal church on Christmas Eve, and on Christmas Day Gary and I joined this same couple, along with our friends' mother/in-law, for a quiet Christmas dinner around an old wooden table - again, candle-lit, with a bare-branch tree and paper-decorations, delicious gourmet food and gluten-free desserts.  We also had the company of their dog, and if you've seen 'Dogs Decoded' you'll know why that is important!

Anyway, what a great holiday it turned out to be!  So quiet, so unostentatious, so sensitive and deep and thoughtful. 

My own family's lineages would have been pleased by its style.

When I was younger I labored long and hard to re-create the Christmases of my youth, fondly-remembered.  I was never quite successful at it, and that is most likely at least partly because their magic was so hyper-fueled by hormones, hopes and expectations.  Great Expectations.  Well, things have not turned out as I planned, but they've taken some amazingly wonderful and unexpected turns to bring us to this place and this moment in time.

Comments

[Peter]

It's funny putting my feet in the shoes of the 9th graders I teach. I think all their experiences and all of their thinking are so infused with hormones that it's easy for me to misunderstand. Everything was so immediate for me back then.

I wonder who would wish to recreate it, though, or, now that I'm over fifty, I wonder who would give up reflection to have it again?

[kasturi]

hi peter,

nice to hear from you. yes, i agree that a quiet, reflective christmas is what i most enjoy today. in my twenties, when i had Great Expectations of having a family of my own, i think i was still under the influence of hormones similar to those in my teens, and i tried to create continuity with my own christmases past. however, that did not 'work' and i had to adjust to a different way of 'doing xmas.' it's surprising to me to see how people jump to the notion that i am 'anti-xmas' just because i don't decorate, bake, wrap, sing, etc and do all the things i used to do. actually, i feel i am having a more subtle, scintillating experience of christmas / solstice now that is very meaningful to me. and i love to watch others enjoying christmas.

hey, happy new year to you, Peter ~ kasturi