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Pixel, no doubt planning her attack of the tree sometime in the dead of night.
21 December 2009
Two more things.
21 December 2009 22:59This should be fun because I've already taken my evening meds. I have to drive Mark to work tomorrow, so I have to be sure to get in a full night's sleep. However I wanted to say these two things.
I love Christmas. I will always love Christmas for the joyful memories of my childhood, for the lights and the carols, and the gatherings of family and friends. As an adult I enjoy it more for it's sense of grateful sometimes quiet celebration among those I love and less for the trappings surrounding it. But over the past 10 years or so, my greatest love has grown for Solstice. I can feel its age, and it speaks to me through genetic memory. This day has been known by our kind for millennia and treated with a visceral respect for what it is - the door back to the light. We feel it now as we felt it then, this hope and longing, excitement and gratitude that the sun is making its return and the night is receding. I'm not expressing this as well as I'd hoped. Christmas is young and brash and tied to a story that not all can believe. In secular dress, it's a fashion formulated and sold to us. But Solstice isn't presented to us; it is. We stumbled upon it; it did not appear cut out of whole cloth. It was observable, this longest night, this slow return to light and warmth. It's as ancient as our world, and I'm in awe of the long, long history of its celebration by our ancestors praying and singing in tongues we no longer speak, dancing in steps lost to time. I have a candle lit to honor you and to carry forward the tradition older than we can rightly know.
That was the first thing. The second is in the category of "Well, that didn't take long." The new owners of our old house have been there less than a month. We heard from the woman today that in that time her husband was in a bad accident and totaled his truck (he was basically OK but lost 4 days of work; she had thrown her back out, and her daughter very recently was thrown from her horse during riding lessons and was quite bruised. Dar feels guilty about not telling them about the curse, but I think there's something else going on. If it were just the house causing all of this nonsense, I wouldn't have had the accident with the Jeep or fallen down the stairs and hurt myself again. Immigration wouldn't have decided to rip my case to shreds. Her brother wouldn't have been rushed to the hospital again in critical condition. No, I think that we were unfairly blaming the house for what I think has been just an astoundingly shitty decade. And the shit has been pouring down more furiously the closer we get to the end.
Everyone I know has had terrible things happen to them or their loved ones in this first decade of the new century. No one has been free of grief or tremendous stress or loss. There has been some good, of course: a number of my younger friends have had babies - all of them wanted, loved, healthy; others have fallen in love and started new lives. There have been new endeavors and new beginnings. It hasn't all been bad. But the bad that there has been has seemed almost relentless, especially in the past few years, as if there had been a tidal wave building and it's just recently hit the shore; now we're dealing with the consequences of that destructive force rushing around our lives. It will recede; it is receding. I have to believe this.
And I have to go to bed. O Happy Solstice to you all, my dear ones.
I love Christmas. I will always love Christmas for the joyful memories of my childhood, for the lights and the carols, and the gatherings of family and friends. As an adult I enjoy it more for it's sense of grateful sometimes quiet celebration among those I love and less for the trappings surrounding it. But over the past 10 years or so, my greatest love has grown for Solstice. I can feel its age, and it speaks to me through genetic memory. This day has been known by our kind for millennia and treated with a visceral respect for what it is - the door back to the light. We feel it now as we felt it then, this hope and longing, excitement and gratitude that the sun is making its return and the night is receding. I'm not expressing this as well as I'd hoped. Christmas is young and brash and tied to a story that not all can believe. In secular dress, it's a fashion formulated and sold to us. But Solstice isn't presented to us; it is. We stumbled upon it; it did not appear cut out of whole cloth. It was observable, this longest night, this slow return to light and warmth. It's as ancient as our world, and I'm in awe of the long, long history of its celebration by our ancestors praying and singing in tongues we no longer speak, dancing in steps lost to time. I have a candle lit to honor you and to carry forward the tradition older than we can rightly know.
That was the first thing. The second is in the category of "Well, that didn't take long." The new owners of our old house have been there less than a month. We heard from the woman today that in that time her husband was in a bad accident and totaled his truck (he was basically OK but lost 4 days of work; she had thrown her back out, and her daughter very recently was thrown from her horse during riding lessons and was quite bruised. Dar feels guilty about not telling them about the curse, but I think there's something else going on. If it were just the house causing all of this nonsense, I wouldn't have had the accident with the Jeep or fallen down the stairs and hurt myself again. Immigration wouldn't have decided to rip my case to shreds. Her brother wouldn't have been rushed to the hospital again in critical condition. No, I think that we were unfairly blaming the house for what I think has been just an astoundingly shitty decade. And the shit has been pouring down more furiously the closer we get to the end.
Everyone I know has had terrible things happen to them or their loved ones in this first decade of the new century. No one has been free of grief or tremendous stress or loss. There has been some good, of course: a number of my younger friends have had babies - all of them wanted, loved, healthy; others have fallen in love and started new lives. There have been new endeavors and new beginnings. It hasn't all been bad. But the bad that there has been has seemed almost relentless, especially in the past few years, as if there had been a tidal wave building and it's just recently hit the shore; now we're dealing with the consequences of that destructive force rushing around our lives. It will recede; it is receding. I have to believe this.
And I have to go to bed. O Happy Solstice to you all, my dear ones.
Christmas tree. We got it yesterday, and Dar and Maddie are decorating it now. I put a few ornaments on, but I'm too wobbly to be of much help tonight. It's a cute tree, much smaller than what Dar usually gets, but it has a lovely shape to it. We went tree hunting yesterday; first we went to a cut-your-own place, but the ones still left standing were paltry things. We had better luck at the second place and managed to find one large enough to satisfy Dar and small enough to stuff into the trunk of my Mazda. It was a Christmas miracle!
