I originally titled this post – 2020! Need I say more?
But then I wondered… what if it’s not about 2020 anymore? (Which btw it isn’t when I look at the calendar)
What if it’s all about 2021? We (as in the entire planet) sure are expecting a lot from it.
How will it ever live up to our expectations? Especially, if as the saying goes, “Expectations are premeditated disappointments.”
Which got me thinking that perhaps the best thing I can do is to stay out of the field of expectations and instead, water the seeds of Love growing in the garden of my heart.
That garden is the one I must tend to, no matter the season, the times, the weather, the state of the world around me. No matter if Covid beats a hasty retreat and we are free to embrace one another again without fearing the worst, the state of the garden of Love in my heart keeps me rooted in grace and gratitude. It opens me up and brings me into the beauty of this moment in which I find myself breathing freely.
May the garden of your heart be full of beauty growing wild and free in all the colours of the rainbow. May you awaken to Love blossoming with every breath you take.
She flows. I open. Myself. The floodgates. The doors. The windows. The entrances to my heart, my mind, my body, my being present. Here.
And in all that is opened up I lose the need to know what word, what thought, what idea comes next and simply allow. The word, the thought, the idea to appear.
This morning, I sat at my desk. My final eggnog latte of the season steamed in my Christmas mug, (final because the container is empty). Beaumont the Sheepadoodle curled up at my feet, piano music played softly all around, the furnace hummed, my husband slept in our bed.
Outside my window, the sun was kissing the night good-bye with rose-streaked kisses.
I sat at my desk and welcomed in the morning with a soul-satisfying breath. It sank, deep, deep into my belly. Softly, silently, it flowed with ease into my lungs, down, down into the crucible of my body, And as I breathed in, then out, I felt my conscious mind sinking down, down into the presence of the sacredness of this life-giving ritual of breathing. With each breath, in and out, I felt my entire being expand into every cell of my body bringing me effortlessly into the hallowed nature of this moment at the edge of day dawning.
I am standing in the middle of the pedestrian bridge that spans the river connecting the east and west end of the city, just before the rolling plains leading to the foothills and the Rockies begin.
I can see where I was standing as I sit at my desk now.
It is early. The sky a grey covered cloudy blanket full of misty, snow-filled moisture.
The world is quiet. Calm. Serene.
There is no traffic on the separate vehicle bridge on the far side of the one on which I stand. No sign of pedestrians on this one either other than one bicycle track that had ploughed through the snow earlier than even my morning saunter.
I shake my head at the thought of someone riding their bike through the snow and am reminded of my friend J.H. who no matter the temperature or conditions, rides his bike everywhere. All year-round. We worked together for several years and some mornings when the wind was howling and the snow blowing, he would arrive at work looking like the Abominable Snowman. It never deterred him. It was one of the things he had to do to help save the planet, he said.
I helped save my sanity yesterday.
I unplugged. Mostly.
Other than FaceTime with my daughter and family, and a check in with La GrandeFamille in France and India via WhatsApp, I kept my online time to the bare minimum.
It was self-preservation. The Christmas blues lurked. Real close. And, without the excitement of preparing to receive family and friends for dinner, the slope into self-pity yawned before me with its alluring view into oblivion.
To keep myself from heeding its siren’s call, I kept myself out of the Christmas chatter that fills my Social Media feeds.
The messages are all so beautiful but yesterday, it kept reminding me of how different (and strange) this Christmas was.
I had awoken early. 4:30 am. At 5, when a girlfriend text to wish us Merry Christmas, I was still awake. I text back a few times and then lay in bed debating about getting up. At 6, my Auntie Maggy called from India. We laugh and chattered and when we hung up, I was wide-awake. I decided to get up.
I wandered through the house. Turned on Christmas lights and music. Bundled up and took Beamont the Sheepadoodle for an early morning wander.
The world was quiet. The sky midnight blue. The river flowed with its normal winter chatter. A Canada Goose honked somewhere in the dark.
The world was as it usually is early on a Christmas morning, though this was a very different kind of Christmas.
C.C. still made his Finnish pancakes but we packaged them up to deliver to his son and girlfriend who, because they live on her parents property would be having dinner in her family bubble.
We still cooked a turkey but instead of sharing it crowded around a table of family and friends, we packaged it up in the late afternoon and delivered it to my daughter’s for The Great Exchange between my daughter, sister and us.
Like soldiers in the trenches on Christmas Day of 1914 who carried out an unofficial truce and crossed the no-man’s land between them to exchange Christmas wishes and even gifts, we approached one another, holding out our packages like peace offerings in a time of war. Except our enemy is an invisible microbe that does not announce itself with guns blazing but slips in undetected until it’s too late to take up arms again.
After The Great Exchange, we drove to dear friends, stood at their front door and from a distance, wished them Merry Christmas and left behind a container full of turkey dinner and fixin’s to enjoy. When we returned home, I made up a heaping plate of turkey dinner and took it to a neighbour. Her husband has been ill. She wasn’t up to cooking a turkey dinner, she’d told me earlier in the day when I’d dropped off a Christmas card and ornament at their door.
And that’s where the Christmas Spirit prevailed. In the small acts of kindness we could share wholeheartedly with one another.
There are still gifts under the tree that haven’t been unwrapped. The roasting pan sits on the kitchen counter waiting to be put away. The dining room table is still set for two, a lonely reminder of the different circumstances of this Christmas. Like year’s past though, there are left-overs in the fridge. The pot of soup we started making last night sits on the deck chilling.
And through it all, woven like threads of gold in a tapestry lovingly crafted by the hands of the many lives that touch ours day in and day out, is the Love that binds us, sustains us, fills us up.
I unplugged from the virtual world yesterday to spend time savouring the magic all around me.
Just as the virus finds little room to create its havoc when we take loving measures to keep our distance, there was no room for the blues to take up residence in my heart. It was too full of the love and joy of the spirit of this season.
May the sacred nature and giving grace of the spirit of Christmas embrace you and your families. May the New Year bring all of us great joy, good health and the closeness that comes without Covid in our midst.
I took a bite of memory yesterday. It slid across my lips and landed on my tongue full of tantalizing reminders of Christmases past.
It took me back. Back to my early teens. We are living in a white house with a big Chestnut tree in the middle of the front driveway. The deck overlooked the garden and then the city below. The drive backed onto a hillside that took you up into the vineyards that dotted the edges of the Black Forest town in which we lived.
Inside, the house is full of the smells and sounds of Christmas. My father is baking in the kitchen. Christmas music playing. Loud.
My sister, Anne, and I are squabbling over whose turn it is to vacuum and whose turn to clean the bathroom.
My mother is fluttering around, trying to keep dad’s dishes to a minimum and desperately trying to admonish Anne and I to ‘quit fighting’ and get to work.
My brother is wafting in and out from his room. Like a prince holding court, he stands (forever) in front of the full-length mirror in the front hallway trying to determine between blue shirt, white shirt or maybe a sweater? In the middle of turning this way and that, he asks Anne and me what we think of what ever he is wearing.
We roll our eyes and say, in unison, “Whichever”, and pretend to go back to doing our jobs.
It was our way, we’d placate our brother and then whine together, like co-conspirators in a bad spy movie, about how he always got to go out and do whatever he wanted while we had to do all the work around the house. Sometimes, if we got the tone and attitude just right, he’d think we were talking about him and pester us with questions. “What’d you say?” “What? You think I should go with the sweater?” “There’s nothing wrong with my hair today, right?” We’d tell him we weren’t even talking about him and scurry off to get our jobs done so we could go meet our friends.
If high-fives had been a ‘thing’ in those days we’d have worn our palms out.
And through it all, my father would be bustling around the kitchen, elbow deep in flour and sugar and everything nice to make one of his many baked Christmas delicacies.
Yesterday, I took a bite of a piece of Stollen. I’d picked it up that morning fresh from the bakers and was transported back to those days long ago..
My father’s Stollen were home baked. It was his way. The kitchen was his domain during the holidays. And while deliciousness was his ethic, excess was his trademark.
In later years, when I was living in Canada and my parents had not yet moved back from Europe, my dad would parcel up a huge box of Christmas goodies and have them delivered by airmail to my front door.
That box came full of his loving hands spicing up every bite and, my mother’s hands too. Because, while the production of so many culinary delights was my dad’s purview, making it all look pretty was my mother’s gift. She shared it well.
Butter tarts. Tins of many different cookies. Pound cakes. Christmas cake. All wrapped up in crinkly bows. Pretty, sparkly papers around each cake. Cheery tins of laughing Santas and elves and trees all dressed up in Christmas finery. It was a gastronomic and pictorial odyssey.
There was something for everyone in that box. Chocolates for my daughters. A treat for the dog. And always, wrapped in a piece of cheese cloth covered with wax paper, tin foil and red wrapping paper, there was a Stollen. Waiting to be devoured.
I sit in the still darkness of early morning. The silence holds me tenderly in its velvety weightlessness.
Hold onto nothing, it seems to whisper. Allow everything in.
I breathe out and let everything go. Everything rushes in.
I breathe in and hold onto nothing. Everything rushes out.
You are the ocean, the velvety silence whispers. You are the sky. The moon and stardust. You are the everything of nothing but Love. There is no need to run or hide or jump up and down for attention. There is no need to yearn or hammer your fists against the universe and sink down into a puddle of weeping sorrow. No need to search for answers or meaning. There is only this nothingness of everything you are when you hold onto nothing and let everything in.
I breathe. In. Again.
Deep. Deep into my belly.
I feel. Deep. Deep in my belly the everything of nothing I hold onto.
I breathe. Out. Again.
Deep. Deep from my belly.
I feel. Deep into the space around me, deep into the darkness of this still silent morning the nothingness of everything I let go of.
And I know without knowing. I feel without feeling. Deep. Deep within my being. Deep in the presence of this moment, that this is the nothing and the everything of all I am. All I can be. All I need. All I want and desire. All of everything I let go of. All of everything I let in.
This is the everything of nothing but what remains when I hold onto nothing.
Breathing deep, I sat in the still darkness of morning.
And that’s where Love found me.
_________________
“My Morning Read”
This morning, as part of my commitment to read a poem every morning, I read Mark Nepo’s, Where is God
Last night, as I sat in the glow of the lights on the Christmas tree, I felt the overwhelming sadness of missing those we cannot be near this Christmas.
“Buck up, Louise,” my inner critic said in a jolly voice. “It’s not that bad. At least it looks like it will be a white Christmas.”
“Small consolation,” I hiss back. “We’ll be all alone. Nobody in our home when Christmas dinner calls us to the table.”
I’m never sure why I feel the need to speak in rhymes to my inner critic (badly I might add) Perhaps it is to disarm him.
“Nope,” the critic says. “It’s to distract yourself. You don’t know how to handle feeling sad, so you avoid it.”
Seriously? You sound like my mother.
Oh, not the one I spent my life trying to understand. That mother took her last breath in February. A sweet, tiny, sparrow-like woman whose arthritic fingers floated up to touch the faces of her daughters and granddaughters who had gathered around her bed to say good-bye.
We could do that still, in late February. Gather with those we love to say farewell. Sit in a circle around her bed, close together, heads bowed, holding each other’s hands, as we said a prayer for this, the final leg of her journey.
That mother, who bid her farewells in February was often a mystery to me. Full of contradictions and insecurities. I sometimes, unkindly, called her needy.
This one, the one who comes to visit me now from someplace on the other side, is full of understanding and wisdom. She laughs and drinks martinis and wears too much perfume and too much jewellery. She doesn’t seem to care. She’s having the time of her life in the afterlife she says.
In her aura, I no longer yearn for the mother of my dreams. I simply yearn for her to keep visiting.
And then I realize he is. Her. My inner critic is my mother’s voice. But this time, she’s not visiting me while I’m in the bath, as is her custom. She’s here, beside the Christmas tree where I sit feeling the melancholy of the hour before midnight and the sadness of this season of joy that will be spent alone.
My mother loved Christmas. She would spend hours decorating, baking, gift-buying and wrapping. From the man at the counter of the store where she normally shopped, to the woman who cut her hair, to the son of the son of the woman who cut her hair. My mother gave to everyone.
It was her way.
The gifts under our tree this year are sparse. Most were ordered online and sent directly to their recipients to avoid physical contact.
And my mother’s voice breaks into my reverie.
“It’s still Christmas Louise. A time to join the triumph of the skies and proclaim, Christ is born in Bethlehem.”
“Since when do you quote Christmas carols?” I ask this unseen presence who sounds like my mother’s voice but doesn’t speak like her at all.
“Since you keep slipping into melancholy instead of Christmas cheer,” my mother’s voice says. “You love Christmas carols. Remember when your girls were little and you’d organize a carolling party and all your friends would come and you would wander the neighbourhood singing at the top of your lungs?”
And I smile and remember. Yes. That was such a good time. Full of laughter and friendship and children’s voices giggling while we parents struggled to carry a tune that nobody cared about anyway. It was the feeling of being together, of being connected that made it all so special.
And I sigh.
“We don’t have those connections this year, mum,” I say to this woman whom I cannot see but whose presence feels so real to me.
“True,” she says. “But it doesn’t mean those days are gone forever. And it definitely doesn’t mean those feelings of connection and belonging aren’t still alive. You just have to work harder to feel them. Use your creativity Louise. You’re good at that.”
And I smile in the silent night. My mother’s voice drifts away and I sit and watch the Christmas lights glow with the promise of a most Holy Night.
Christmas this year can’t be like Christmases past.
But it can still be full of those feelings and sensations I love so much. Of being connected. Immersed in love and joy. Of being part of something magical and mysterious and miraculous.
If it is to be, it is up to me.
Quietly, I turn off the Christmas tree lights. Let Beaumont out for one last romp in the now snow covered earth and then climb into bed beside my beloved who is already fast asleep.
I close my eyes and say a prayer of gratitude. For my beloved sleeping beside me. For my mother who visits me now so I can know peace. For this life I live that is so full of joy and for all those who make it a beautiful tapestry of family and friendship woven together with Love.
We may not be gathered around a crowded Christmas table laden with the food we all prepared, but we will be gathered together in our hearts. And in our hearts, there is only room for one thing. Love.
In years to come, when time has passed and the edges of memory have softened and mellowed with age, we will sit close together around a table, or snuggle up in front of a fire or walk arm in arm under a clear blue sky and tell stories of these days. We’ll laugh and sometimes shed a tear or two. We’ll raise a toast to those who did not make it through and we will remember.
We’ll remember how we stood on balconies and front porches and clanged pots at 6pm every day for weeks on end to honour the heroes of these days. The nurses and doctors and lab techs and hospital porters and emergency responders and schedulers and cleaners and so many more who risked their lives so we could live ours without fearing each breath would be our last. And the researchers, labouring long days and nights, weeks and months garbed in hazmat suits and protective shields just to find a vaccine to help preserve lives for years to come.
We’’ll talk about how heroes didn’t wear red cloaks and carry golden shields but donned brown and blue and tan coats as they drove all over the country to ensure we received the things we needed. Things to eat. To read. To listen to. To play with. To keep us amused. And laughing. And feeling alive and less alone.
How there were heroes who stood behind plexiglass screens and sanitized counter tops again and again after we visited stores where we bought our necessities and smiled with only our eyes visible through our masks.
How we greeted each other with a wave, careful to keep our distance and how the distance between us felt so foreign. Lonely. Far. Even when we stood six feet apart.
How hugs became a rare commodity, so precious some would risk their lives just to get one. And how some did risk their lives, not just for hugs but to ease the loneliness, the pain of being separate from the rest of their human family.
And how some chose to stand united against the things they could not stand for — Wearing masks. Social distance. Stay-at-home orders. Like all of us, they wanted their voices to be heard. It’s just their way was different.
And hopefully, we’ll talk about how those of us who did our best to abide by stay-at-home and wearing-mask orders struggled to understand how others could not grasp the severity of our situation. And how, our condemnation and judgement of those who suffered these times in different ways than us became a greater distance to traverse than the loneliness we all felt during these days of sheltering-in-place.
There will come a time when we will tell stories of these days and while we may not remember them fondly, let us remember how we each did our best to weather this storm. And how, while someone’s way may have been different, they too were doing their best to make sense of it all and to make a difference in whatever way they knew how.
And as we remember, let us let go of our human tendency to condemn those who think differently, believe differently, express themselves differently. Instead, let us cross the divide of our differences so that we can celebrate having come through these days of a global pandemic sweeping the globe, together.
Let us not remember our differences but instead, let us share our memories of love for the millions of lives lost, the millions of lives fallen ill, the millions of lives forever changed.
Let us remember our loved ones not with the regret of not being by their bedsides as they struggled to take their last breath, but rather, of all the times we sat by their sides laughing and sharing in the love that binds us in life, and in death.
Let us remember we were all struggling. Believers and non-believers. Mask wearers and non-mask wearers. Instead of making outcasts of those who did it differently, let us say a prayer. For one another. And in our prayers let us hold onto what connects us, what makes us who we are, what makes this human condition so remarkable.
Our humanity is not one colour, one belief, one common roadmap. It is diverse. Colourful. Multi-faceted. We stand on deserts and mountaintops. We walk on gravel paths and paved roads. We swim in salty oceans and freshwater lakes.
And still, we breathe air into our lungs. We flow blood through our veins. Our bodies are supported by skeletons made up of bones, 206 in every adult body. Our body is covered with the epidermis, no matter the colour of our skin.
In years to come, when we look back on these times and tell our stories of grief and hardship, of great feats of heroism and simple acts of kindness, let us remember to speak with gratitude and grace and kindness in every word we share about one another.
Because, in times to come, when we speak of these days, we will be speaking of ourselves. Of we, the people.
All of us. Coming through this. Together.
Let us carry with us the memories of how, no matter how dark the day or long the night, we never lost sight of the Love that binds us. The Love that brings us into this world and carries us through every day of our lives. For we each come into this world in the same way. Crying. Kicking. Gasping for breath. And we all leave it on one final breath.
And in between, though our lives may be different, let us remember that it is our capacity to love one another that connects us. Through good times and bad. Dark and light. Life and death.
In years to come, let us tell our stories. Let us remember. And let us hold onto Love.
Solstice is upon us and with it, I feel the calling of the muse to write my way into the light.
To stretch myself, to tease my poetic senses into verse, to give my mind an opportunity to lean into the unknown, beyond those spaces where my thinking has crystallized into certainty that I have it all figured out… I have begun a practice of reading a poem a morning – and then – letting whatever that poem inspires come into being through word and image.
Dare Boldly 