Category Archives: Holidays

Holidays

Quiet Holidays

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Winter         Christmas Day                               Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

Kate got me a very funky, floppy, curly haired Woolly Mammoth.  I’ve plopped him on the grand piano for now.  He awaits a name, which has not come to me yet.

Santa passed us by otherwise, going on to homes with little boys and girls, waking up bright eyed, eager, hopeful.  The run up to Christmas with movies, music, lights, commercials, worship services, letters to the editor complaining about this aspect or another of how we celebrate it, cranks everybody into a mild, or not so mild, frenzy, hoping, hoping, hoping that their strategy for this Christmas will be the one.  It was here.

We eased through the holidays on a slow, modest note with a few gifts sent out to the grandkids and kids, not much else.

Family, Holidays, Retirement

Yo, Yo, Yo

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Winter                                                Full Moon of the Winter Solstice

(from yesterday)

Yo, yo, yo.  Merry Christmas.   My stocking today brimmed over with absolutes and passive periphrastics.  Show you how far I am from school.  I’m doing the optional exercises in the back of Wheelock and bought a workbook so I’ll have even more.  Why?  Want to learn this stuff so it stays.  Even with that I know it will require regular work to keep my skills up.  Fortunately, that’s why Jupiter made Ovid.

Kate has 13 working days until she walks out the door forever as a full-time employee.  She’ll stay on as a casual employee for a couple of years, 4-6 shifts a month, and then after that.  Nada.  Nihil.  Non.

Today.  I burrowed into Wheelock yesterday.  Guess I’ve found my hobby.  Or, my vocation/avocation.  Into the museum for a Thaw and an Embarrassment tour.  Then back for more Latin.

Faith and Spirituality, Holidays, Humanities, Memories, Myth and Story

Light and Dark

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Samhain                                            Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

The holidays.  Important for personal reflection, even have the ability to transform a life as we lay our lives alongside the possibilities suggested by Thanksgiving, Chanukah, Christmas, the Winter Solstice, New Years.  Birthdays, anniversaries, too, can reach into the deep part of your self, we can call it soul, and help you see yourself in the other.  Maybe, they let you see in there, too.  Holidays are a time out of time, a break in the straight ahead, up and at’em busyness of career, family, school.

There is, though, a dark side to the holidays.  All moments of possibility contain paths that lead not to transformation but to destruction, temptation, agony and pain.  The dark paths often emerge when the vulnerability and self-intimacy of the holiday intersects old ways of being, often ways learned in family settings, banished most of the year; but, as family and holiday conjoin, the vulnerability allows the past to rise quickly, to overwhelm.

This is as the Tao teaches us.  Even the dark side of the holidays offers a chance to become new, a chance to take the past and place it in a new frame, a way of understanding that puts the past in its own place and leaves the future open, perhaps even better for the relocation.

Darkness is not, in itself, bad.  Nor is light, in itself, good.  Too much light prevents our ability to see.  “Light is the enemy of art,” as the curator of the Thaw wing of the Fenimore museum said.  Darkness nurtures and heals, is a time for sleep, for seeds to germinate.  The holidays bring a special charge to the light and the darkness in our lives.  Our task is to open ourselves to what each has to offer us; to take it in and accept the possibilities.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Holidays, Humanities

Winter’s Loon

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Samhain                                       Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

It’s the best time of the year.  Ring a ling, ring a ling, ring a ling.  Yes, because the woods are lovely, dark and deep.  And because we have promises to keep.  It’s the best time of the year.

I’m no Christmas curmudgeon.  The lights and the cheeriness lift my spirits, too.  Yet it is not the lights toward which I drift, drawn in Frost’s New England sleigh pulled by a draft horse black as the snow falling is white.  I wander toward the woods, the dark and the deep.  In there, amongst the trees, far from city lights lies the reason for the season for me.

Each night for the last week or so I’ve heard my favorite sound of the season, the hooting of a great gray owl which lives in our woods.  I’ve never seen this bird and this may will be the child of the one I heard years ago.  The bass voice declares a confidence in the dark and the cold, an embrace.  The rhythm and the solitariness of the sound captures the winter dark as a loon’s cry distills the summer sun setting on a northern lake.

This is the carol for which my heart yearns; strange, in its way, since the great gray is the apex predator in our world, excepting, of course, the humans.

So, as you drink your Christmas cheer, crack the window a bit, listen. You might hear the voice of the woods, lovely, dark and deep.

Family, Great Wheel, Holidays, Humanities

While The Cyber River Closed

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Samhain                           New Winter Solstice Moon

Midnight  12/6/10

Writing this on Word since I’ve had no internet connection for a few hours.  My limited number of tricks have not produced a link and I don’t have the patience for navigating so-called “customer service.”  George Orwell would be proud of the internet and internet services industry.

Kate’s cold continues with little sign of progress.  She suffers, complains about not liking to be sick, but otherwise Norwegian’s through it all.  She takes illness as a personal insult, something to be shrugged off if possible, if not, to work through and last something that requires rest and chicken noodle soup.  She’s in the latter mode right now.  Good for her.

We skyped tonight.  It’s Hanukkah so the grandkids had various gifts from doting grandparents and uncles and aunts.  The literal hit of the evening was an inflatable t-ball set.  Ruth took swing after swing, often swinging from her right shoulder and leveling at the ball.  She’s co-ordinated for 4.  Or, rather 4 and ½.

Her blond hair swirls, ringlets tumbling every which way as she performs couchnastics, a living room form of gymnastics that replaces gym equipment with the normal living room furniture.

My Latin is still here spread out on the desk beside me.  This Ovid requires slow, laborious work.  Look up words.  Figure out forms.  Check usage possibilities, verb tenses, noun declensions.  A lot of back and forth with books and pages of help.  I realized tonight that it’s a hobby, something I’m doing for fun.  Weird, huh?

Winter has snugged us up in the house, the furnace and insulation our best friends just as the AC and the insulation are our best friends in the summer.  I like winter because it provides all this darkness for desk work, darkness in which there are no outdoor chores.  Therefore, no guilt.

Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Work, Holidays, Humanities

Black Friday

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Samhain                                                   Waning Thanksgiving Moon

Kate had to tell me, again, what black Friday means.  Apparently (and you probably already know this) it’s the date retailers calculate they slip over from being in the red to being in the black.  When I have trouble remembering something, it’s often because I have another association clogging up the rememberer.  In this case black Friday has a theological tinge in my brain; it takes me to a day of lost hope, ultimate despair.  As a result, I have trouble associating it with anything positive.

If I consider the number of people camped outside (one woman since Wednesday night at a particular BestBuy), and, if I consider the reason many of them are in those lines, my association seems closer to the mark.  Our emphasis on extravagant gifts to celebrate the birthday of a man who wanted us to declare freedom to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind has always revealed the dark side hedonism which we let loose at Christmas, but the pitiful sight of people braving cold and inclement weather as blind captives of our economic system.  Well…

A very positive note is the number of scientists now willing to engage in reasoned debate on the topic of global warming.  Understanding the science behind global warming takes careful attention to several different lines of reasoning and a dispassionate explication of those various strands works best from within a scientific rather than a political frame.  Perhaps, as an article in the paper said, we will be able to move beyond this debate and onto the question of what can we do.

We are not saving the earth; the earth will be fine no matter what we do.  We want to preserve an earth fit for human habitation; that’s what’s at risk here.  Can we learn to live on this planet lightly enough that it can carry us, feeding us, watering us, disposing of our wastes, providing materiale necessary for our habitations and our economies?  Those are the stakes.

Aging, Family, Holidays

Axel’s

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Samhain                                        Waning Thanksgiving Moon

Kate, Annie and I ate Thanksgiving dinner at Axel’s Woodroast in Roseville.  This was a major production, a huge buffet and seating for family size parties in the ballroom.  The food was good, not gourmet, but good.  I actually had breakfast, more or less, a crepe, bacon, scrambled eggs, some asparagus, watermelon and a mixed green salad followed by two creme brulee tarts.  Our waitress was an old hand who stayed mostly out of the picture, showing up just when we needed things for the most part.

I found the large number of people satisfying, as it mimicked the crowded Thanksgivings of my childhood.  I had the large number of people feeling without having to actually interact them.  Perfect.

Kate’s in for a nap, the dogs have toys to play with and I’m going back to reading my Chinese mystery novel.

Hope your afternoon is a good one, too.

Aging, Art and Culture, Asia, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Humanities

The Value of Increasing Darkness

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Samhain                                         Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

The daylight is gone, twilight has fallen and night is on its way.  Now that we have entered the season of Samhain, the leaves have vanished from the trees and the clouds, like tonight, often hang gray in the sky.  Samhain means the end of summer and in the old Celtic calendar was the half of the year when the fields went fallow while the temperature turned cool, then cold, hope returning around the first of February, Imbolc, when the ewes would freshen and milk would once again be part of the diet as new life promised spring.

In between Imbolc and Samhain lies the Winter Solstice.  The early darkness presages the long twilight; it lasts from now until late December as we move into the increasing night until daylight becomes only a third of the day.  This has been, for many years, my favorite time of year.  I like the brave festivals when lights show up on homes and music whirs up, making us all hope we can dance away our fear.

The Yamatanka mandala at the Minnesota Institute of Art gives a meditator in the Tantric disciplines of Tibetan Buddhism a cosmic map, brightly displaying the way to Yamatanka’s palace grounds.  In the middle of the palace grounds, represented here by a blue field with a vajra (sacred thunderbolt) Yamantaka awaits our presence.

In the Great Wheel as I have come to know it, we visit Yamantaka on the night of the Winter Solstice, that extended darkness that gives us a foretaste of death.  Our death.  On that night we can sit with ourselves, calm and quiet, imagining our body laid out on a bed, eyes closed, mouth quiet, a peaceful expression on our lifeless face.

We can do that, not in suicidal fantasy, but in recognition of our mortality, our finite time upon the wheel of life, awaiting our turn as the wheel turns under the heavens carrying us away from this veil of samsara.  If we can do that, we can then open ourselves to the thin sliver of light that becomes more and more, as the solstice marks the turning back of the darkness and brings us once again to life.

When we can visit Yamantaka’s palace, sup with him in this throne room and see death as he, the conqueror of death sees it, we are finally free.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Humanities, Myth and Story

Holiseason: The Sacred Walks Among Us

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Samhain                                           Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

Holiseason has gotten underway with the usual signs:  bare trees, halloween candy going stale in the bowl, Santa Claus and Christmas music showing up well before Thanksgiving, a few turkey related cartoons.  The concentrated portion of holiseason begins with Thanksgiving and runs with little stopping through January 6th, the Feast of the Epiphany and the last of the Twelve Days of Christmas.

Now, we have signs and symbols, little in the way of active celebrating, but a sacred nimbus began to spread out as Samhain festivities came and went, a nimbus that extends over this difficult, cold, darkening period, drenching us in the depths of our own lives and in the collective life of our friends, family and community.  This is a two month plus stretch of the year that cries out for alone time, time to explore what constitute our deepest values, for together time to reaffirm our love and our regard for each other, for gifts and lights and merriment. Let Fezziwig’s feast start early this year.

I wish you the best of this long and roller coast time, a cup of good cheer, a smile and a moment or more of reflection, even meditation.