Ah yes. This is Christmas

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Joyfully, we gathered around the Christmas tree. We hung decorations. Teased one another. Laughed and shared memories of Christmases past and hopes and dreams of Christmases to come.

This morning, I walked into the living room, switched on the tree lights, made myself my seasonal eggnog latte indulgence, sat at my desk, and watched early morning traffic cross the bridge. It is sparse at this early hour. Car lights moving west to east, crossing over the river that flows in an indolent stream of shimmering waters growing ever slower as Arctic air swoops down to envelope us in its icy maw.

Baby it’s cold outside.

Inside, my world is wrapped in the scents and scenes of Christmas á la 2022.

Like pocketbooks all over the country, my yearning to decorate the house is thinner this year. Perhaps the austerities of the pandemic have invaded my senses.

The big [;astoc tubs full of boughs and decorations lay unopened. Some of them didn’t even make it up from the storage room downstairs.

The tree stands tall in all her glittering light, festooned with glass balls and ornaments, delicate butterflies and feathered friends.

I wonder if this simple yet beautiful display is enough.

If maybe this year, it’s time to pare down the excess of Christmases past and cull the bountiful stash of Christmas ornaments I’ve accumulated over the years.

Perhaps, in keeping with the austerity these inflationary times seem to naturally have ignited in so many, it’s time to declutter Christmas.

I sit at my desk and watch the river slowly shifting-shape from flow to frozen shape. The reflection of the Christmas tree lights shimmer in the window in front of me. Darkness holds the night still.

Long before Christianity appeared along the human journey, people gathered around evergreen trees to celebrate Solstice. For our ancestors, the evergreen and its constant colour, needs and scent, represented the promise of longer, warmer days to come.

In our gathering last night, we decorated the tree connected through time to this ancient symbol of the light regaining its strength over the dark.

In our gathering, our laughter, our shared history and love, we wove the magic of time and this season together into a beautiful tapestry full of the promise of Love. Hope. Peace and Joy.

Ah yes. This is Christmas.

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Why so serious? (an SWB post)

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Beaumont tells me I’m taking myself too seriously.

I tell him that’s just not true.

Come on over to his place today and find out if I finally win an argument! Just click HERE>

Still (an Advent poem)

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We are on the edge of a winter blast descending. Just in time for Christmas!

Except, the promise is that by Christmas day, it will turn less frigid but not balmy.

It is the winter season here at the foot of the Canadian Rockies. Temperatures climb and plummet. Climb and plummet. And we adapt. And even in our adaptations we accept, grumbling is acceptable. Grumbling can be the norm.

Skies hang grey and sullen, clouding the sun like a teenager sulking in their room after being grounded.

Ice is slowly inching out from the river’s banks and gravel bars closing the gaps between land and water.

And the world waits.

My Saturday mood is full of anticipation. We are putting up the tree and decorating tomorrow evening. My youngest daughter, hopefully C.C.’s son and girlfriend and maybe even my sister and her husband will join in the festivities.

For me, this is Christmas. It’s not about the gifts. It’s about. gathering with those near and dear to us, creating memories, sharing meals and laughter and being part of something magical that embraces us in its beauty and joy.

In this Saturday morning mood, the muse visited and I heeded her call…

Still
By Louise Gallagher ©2022

Almost still
water 
shivers
held captive between a season
of bounty 
losing its strength
against winter ice
lined up like an army 
ready to advance
across the river’s flow
captured by winter
advancing with its relentless
Arctic breath.

Behind front doors
strung with festive boughs
and twinkling lights
we wait
still
hopeful
the light will return to
winter burnished skies
held captive within
the longest night’s
journey 
turning back
towards the light.

In the depths
of long dark night of winter 
someone whispers 
a child is coming
and the world holds 
still
its collective breath
captive in the hope
this child
will bring love, peace and joy
for all the world
to know
winter passes,
spring thaws,
and summer blossoms
turn with the season’s passing
into autumn’s bounty.

Please don’t let me die alone.

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There was a time when Terry drove a semi back and forth across America, delivering livestock to rodeos and ranches across Canada and the US.

He loved his life. The freedom of the road. The camaraderie of truckers. The unstructured life.

For years, he didn’t need one place to call home. He had the wide-open road.

And then, life caught up with him. A gambling addiction. Alcohol. His body wearing down sooner than expected. No life-savings.

He ended up at a homeless shelter.

But even there, Terry didn’t succumb to the ennui of that place called ‘homeless’. He volunteered every day. His favourite role was carrying people up and down the elevators. He loved having that swipe pass. He liked the status and the opportunity to greet clients and visitors on every ride.

“I’m driving them where they need to go!” he’d joke.

Terry joked a lot. “Life is so bizarre you gotta laugh,” he’d say.

About once a week he’d ask me to marry him and then rescind the offer. “I don’t want to have to fight C.Cl” he’d joke.

Terry was small in stature. Big in heart and attitude.

When a cancer diagnosis befell him, he swore he was not going down without a fight.

He fought hard, but within months it was obvious, even to Terry, that the cancer was winning.

It was a few weeks before Christmas and Terry was failing fast. He decided to take one more kick at the can and for his Wishlist ask that year, he told the young woman interviewing him that all he really wanted before he died was to visit New Orleans during Mardi Gras. I’ve driven through that city countless times with my semi but never during Mardi Gras.

The young woman who was interviewing him for the Wishlist (an annual event sponsored by an amazing couple Dan and Jenny) had met Terry many times volunteering at the shelter.

She decided she was going to make his wish come true.

Terry’s health failed to fast for him to go, but here’s where the miracle of this season takes center stage.

One of the media outlets who came to support Terry’s wish was the Calgary Herald. The reporter was so moved by Terry’s story, he wrote a full page spread.

That article was read by a woman in Calgary who happened to know one of Terry’s brothers who lived in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.

Terry’s brother had been looking for him since he’d run away from home at the tender age of eight years old and was picked up by social services.

When his brother read the story, he showed his wife who promptly went on line, found the number for the shelter and called me.

I was there the day Terry and his brother were reunited.

It was one of the most beautiful moments I ever experienced.

And though Terry never did get to Mardi Gras, before he passed we held a party in his honour at a Cajun bar in town. Over 100 people turned up to wish him well.

“I don’t deserve all of this,” Terry insisted.

“You deserve so much more,” was the response from pretty well everyone there.

See, when Terry was first diagnosed he insisted he did not want to die anywhere than at the shelter.

I don’t want to be in a strange place surrounded by strangers he insisted.

We did everything we could to ensure he was comfortable, safe and well cared for. But in the end, hospice was the only answer.

I drove him to the hospice the day he moved in. His brother met us there and spent the next two weeks with him.

And the most miraculous part of it all is that when Terry took his last breath, he wasn’t amongst strangers. His brother was sitting at the side of his bed, holding his hand.

This is a story Metro News did on Terry.

Knit One. Pearl One.

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It was just a plain cardboard box labelled with my name and address. The name of a town in New Brunswick the only clue as to the sender.

I knew who sent it. A woman named Sharon who for the past three years had been sending an identical box because two of her children had once found their way to the emergency homeless shelter where I worked before finding their way back home several years later.

In her note that year she wrote:

“Enclosed is a box of handmade mitts and hats from two gals from New Brunswick who truly believe in the work that you and your volunteers offer the residents of Calgary. As in the past, you have supported our children as they went out west to find employment, and start a new life, that may not have been so glamorous, and ended up in your shelter.

In our appreciation, please accept these small tokens, made with huge hearts by mothers who know what it is like to have a child that has lived on the streets in Calgary. May these warm gifts from our heart help others that are in need this coming winter.

As in past years, these items are made with wool from sheep that have grazed in New Brunswick, wool spun and manufactured at Briggs & Little in New Brunswick and knitted by myself, a New Brunswicker and Marg, a Newfoundlander.

May you and your volunteers know that your work has not gone unnoticed but has encouraged many, even mothers on the east coast of Atlantic Canada.”

A plain cardboard box that held all the prayers and hopes of mothers the world over. May my child come home, safe and sound — for Christmas, Hanukkah, Ramadan. Whatever the occasion. May my child come home, safe and sound.

We never know when something we do will make a difference. We never know what that difference will be. We never know whose heart we’ll touch.

Sharon touched my heart that day and memories of her grace and kindness continue to resonate in my world today.

She reminds me that this is an amazing world. A world where on one side of the street people walk wrapped up in the warm coats of lives stitched together from one moment to the next filled with things to do, places to go, people to see. A world where, sadness and bleakness wear weary paths to the place where shelter is found in every kind of weather, just across the street.

A world where, just across the nation, mothers, like Sharon and Marg, sit together and knit away the dark hours of winter to the soothing hum of knit one, pearl one.

A world where knitting needles click and two mothers create a gift that will shelter the hands of those who have been left out in the cold.

With each knit one, pearl one, Sharon and Marg stitch together the possibility of hope arising in the hearts of those who receive their gifts — no matter the state of their lives or their position at the shelter — because each stitch has been cast with a pearl one of gratitude, a knit one of hope.

In opening the box of multi-coloured mittens, I was reminded that when we knit one in hope, pearl one in gratitude, we stitch into the tapestry of this world all the love a mother’s heart can hold. A love that, no matter the distance between us, can never be torn apart, can never come unstitched. Is never lost, no matter how lost we may feel.

May we all be blessed with pearls of hope stitching our lives into a tapestry full of the possibility to our returning home where ever that may be.

AWWWE Monday

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This photo is from Beau’s blog yesterday — surprise, surprise, the one where he manages to win the argument… AGAIN! As always.

He’s hoping you’ll hop on over and take a read. He loves visitors!

This post and photo is also in response to a blog challenge at Awww Mondays which I learned about today over at Eugi’s place – and because her photo has an amazing photo of a Beagle in a Christmas tree… I had to share Beau’s here too!.

Wrap yourself in loving-kindness

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When I worked in an adult emergency homeless shelter, amidst the joy and laughter, the lights and decorations that adorn this time of year in the rosy glow of family gatherings and festive delights, the air was also filled with the sadness of loneliness and the heavy despair of homelessness.

For those without a place to call home, finding joy always came shrouded in the memories of joy lost, connections broken, family circles torn apart by poverty, addiction, violence and loss.

One year, we invited clients to share holiday messages to post on our website. I was always in awe of how excited those who participated were to have a chance to reach out to family and friends and let them know they were thinking of them and wishing them well.

One of those individuals was Zahir. His nickname was ‘Happy’ because he could always be counted on to lighten even the darkest moments with his laughter.

Zahir was diagnosed with a mental illness when his daughter was three. He was exiled from the family home and his community and began a long journey through homelessness.

He was in his 50s when we did a video story with Zahir one Christmas. We wanted to show the human side of homelessness. To help those who had never experienced it or judged the shelter and those experiencing homelessness, find compassion and understanding for those who used the shelter as their respite.

This video had an even more important purpose which would only be revealed several months later when I received a letter from a woman who had never given up searching for the father she’d lost when she was 3 years old.

As a child, she’d been forbidden from seeing or searching for, her father. As an adult, she made it her mission to find him. One of the things she did constantly, was search the websites of emergency shelters across Canada in the hopes of finding him. In her letter, she told me it was a miracle she stumbled across our video. She had started to give up hope of ever finding her father.

Zahir and his by-then 30-something daughter were reunited. At that reunion, Zahir got to meet his 2-year-old granddaughter and learned that he would be a grandfather again later that same year.

Zahir, despite his daughter’s requests he come live with them in another city, would not leave the shelter. It was the world he knew. And, though he never met his second grandchild, when Zahir passed away later that year, he was a very happy man. He had met the daughter he’d never lost hope of one day seeing again.

In the darkness of homelessness, Zahir held onto hope and loving-kindness.

May we all do the same.

This is the video that sparked the miracle of Zahir and his daughter’s reunion.

The Beauty throughout the year

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It is easy when I’m with my grandchildren to feel my heart breaking open wider and wider with each magical whisper of their voices, each lyrical laugh, each wide-eyed gaze they make.

Away from them, immersed in the mundane of daily living, I can sometimes forget that magic, wonder and awe are as present as the normal everyday things that fill my life.

It is in those moments of mundanity that I must pause, close my eyes, breathe and become present within the moment, present to the world around me, present with all that is within the moment.

All of it. The mundane. The exquisite. The superficial. The profound. All of it.

And when I do become present within it all, I awaken within the beauty and Love that is flowing constantly all around.

It is easy to forget. So much better to remember.

This Too Shall Pass

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Winter has arrived with blustery, frigid breath.

The forecast is Cold. More cold. And cold some more.

The ground lies frozen beneath its snowy blanket. Squirrels huddle in their winter nests. Geese hunker down on frost covered riverbanks. Birds still their raucous song.

The river keeps flowing.

Trees stand silent, naked branches extended into the air like varicose veins creeping across thin, aged skin.

Time keeps passing, its relentless movement oblivious to winter’s harsh winds.

A stranger emails me from Montreal. She’s read my OpEd which was reprinted in the Montreal Gazette. She wants to quote me. “… the knowledge and experience I’ve accrued over 40 years of building my career have provided me with a lifetime of wisdom to draw on that informs and enriches all my interactions.”

I love that line, she writes.

I reply, “I would be honoured.”

A connection made between two strangers, through words poured out onto a screen, imprinted on paper far away.

Two lives intersect, their words carried on invisible strands of ethernet spinning through time and space.

Lives continue to unfold, moments woven through with possibilities unseen, unknown, untouched.

Chance encounters. Lives connected through sometimes momentary, sometimes extended moments.

Lives keep unfolding as winter descends.

Everything changes.

Everything remains constant in its changing states.

Winter has arrived.

Seeds of possibility quietly dream, cozy and warm within an Arctic embrace.

This too shall pass, the wind whispers. This too shall pass

And the river flows, sluggish now, as temperatures drop and winter takes hold.

This too shall pass.