After a few years' hiatus, this year I decided to write a letter of December greetings to send to friends. Here it is for you in nearly unabridged form complete with a few extras. I greet you today, this minute as you visit here, with kindness. While greeting you, the soft light of a candle gently glows from my desktop just to my right and a pine cone someone painted with gold and sparkles unobtrusively shimmers.
The letter:
December greetings,
I am curious: do you enjoy receiving "Christmas letters" folded into the cards that arrive to you, or not? For me, I do enjoy hearing from people and these notes -- thanks -- and I also wonder if sometimes the template Christmas letter can feel a bit, well, I don't know, like something is missing...
With that, I send one of my own.
Oh the glory that the Lord has made and the complications you could do without
I heard a song on the radio recently that quickly drew me in. It was likely these brief lyrics--and the feel of the song--that led me to sit down beside the speakers to listen, to sit on the little wooden rocking chair my grandfather made, to take a gamble that the potato water boiling vigorously on the stove would not rush over the lip of the pot and spill.
The song was Casimir Pulaski Day by Sufjan Stevens. While listening, I experienced a panoply of images and senses combining memory, imagination, recognition: the nice feeling that can come form a neck being kissed; the dense, weighted, and overwhelming energy of sadness that can come when someone dies; images of beauty and wonder and kindness and love and pain and loss. Oh the glory and the complications.
I wonder what kind of year it has been for you? What glory? What complications? Maybe you felt glory in the complications. Maybe not.
I have experienced my own version of "the full catastrophe" as Jon Kabat-Zinn has put it with what has felt like more experiences on the draining side than on the renewing. One example: I've had the most incredible experience with a tenant and her father that eventually resulted in her eviction -- they excelled at not telling the truth and at not paying their rent and showing incredible disregard and disrespect. The situation evolved into a long, exasperating saga. It could be said it gave me an opportunity to dig deep and stand up for and assert myself. It could also be said it felt, at times, like it could do me in and was deeply disheartening with respect to the lack of virtues being displayed by the pair. Was there glory in this complication? Right now, I am worn out, angry, likely hurt.
Sometimes, also, I am dancing.
Over the year, I have put out the world more publicly some of my desires. I have taken risks as I try to move toward a balance of work that works well for me on many fronts. I have made some progress. I am not there yet. I continue on the path of trying to take care of my health and the whole of all that that means. I have had some new health complications. I continue to grow and unfold and develop. I have made some "art that works" rather than much in the way of works of art. I have wept deeply, laughed hard at times, and persevered. I have felt moved and touched by many people and many things. I have watched the sun dip below the horizon with the most extraordinary fanfare including lavish displays of colour; the moon fantastically large and orange standing, peering, rising, and glowing; tree roots tangled and woven by years and stories, conversing with the wind and traveling toward deep pools.
I think of a story I heard recently about a young neighbour of mine who is about 5 years old. A few years' ago, I had the opportunity to greet him each day along my walk to work. That autumn, he greeted me in return each day with the gift of a fallen leaf. He would see me coming and start looking for the leaf he would give me that day. I loved those gifts, his enthusiasm, and his smiles. As the more recent story goes: this year or last, he decided to dress up as the wind for Hallowe'en. He would go to people's homes and introduce himself, "I am the wind...whoosh". He would make a whooshing kind of sound. This is a boy after my own heart.
If you are feeling very sad when this note arrives and the holidays descend whether wanted or not, then what? This is a question I think about a lot. If you are feeling very burdened or angry or not, then what? If you are feeling worried or scared? If you are feeling any of these and it was autumn and we lived nearby, I would offer you a freshly fallen leaf, bright and golden. Although it is not autumn and you do not live nearby, I offer one to you just the same. I offer it not because I believe it can remove the weighted weighted weighted complications -- if only -- if only it could -- but because I want you to have it. And I am thinking of you. And I want to reach out across the chasm and say, hello. Also, there is something about a golden or fiery leaf just as there is something about a stone, a shell, a handful of sand or one grain, a maple key or other seed, a landscape of freshly fallen white snow... There is just something about all of htat that makes me want to say, "Here, something for you, to breathe with, to hold...".
And if you are feeling fine, excited, warm, delighted, I offer you also this leaf, and I also say, hello.
I look up
into the faces of stars,
into their deep silence.
--Mary Oliver
I look up into the faces of the stars and I breathe in and out and I offer my hope and my wish and my earnest prayer that you may be safe, that you may be healthy, that you may be happy, that you may be at ease. I offer the prayer that you may have access to the comfort and support of others, to shelter and wonderful food, and to kindness--from others, yes, and also from your own most precious self.
Something opens our wings. Something, and many things.
_______________
* "Something opens our wings" is a line from a poem by Rumi. The lines by Mary Oliver are from her poem (and book) The Leaf and The Cloud. The Sufjan Stevens song is from his album, Illinoise.
