THE EIGHTH DAY OF CHRISTMAS

…I am a day behind on my Days, as by the time I might have posted anything our internet connection had been reduced to a blinking red light on the modem.  But right to it: the Eighth Day is (was) called “Snow Day.”  Although the term is pregnant with meaning for schoolchildren everywhere, alas, school’s already out and we are left with the awareness and celebration of snow, that brightening white stuff that is so sorely missed when it’s gone, and the weather outside is frightfully dank and gray. 

The fact of Central Illinois’s’s’s dreary winters led me to channel the following:

Central Illinois Christmas Poem of Woe 
by Central Illinois

Gray above,
Brown below.
If I could, I would I'd
Call out the sun,
down the snow.

The fact that someone did call down the snow on Snow Day seemed apropos of something, if only a kiss from Lady Luck.  It has brightened things up considerably, in spite of the fact that we will sculpt no snowballs or persons out of this fluffy, powdery stuff (although it was quite easy to shovel). Feeling brightened, and bemused, and wonderstruck one fine day, post-snowfall, I wrote some more upbeat verses:

POOLS AND FLAKES

new powder, clean and light,

dropped last night,

banks the windward corners of

lawns and beds

with bright snow-shadows

it rests in cracks and pocks

of sidewalk and street,

whites the hollows

in black dirt and brown leaf

it pools without puddling or rippling,

off-white and quiet

until clear sun pushes hard through the

wandering, luminescent seams between

the blue-gray curtain-clouds

that float and morph and ponder form:

the light chases all hint

of shadow, shade, tint or texture

from the surface of the frost puddles,

flashing back to the very first white

…the deep-breath rush of gusts

does sky make wind or wind make sky?

bit by bit strips the dark tree skeletons of their skunk-stripes of white

interlocked crystals,

layered and caked,

and lifts the snow as flakes again

through the wending light

—where they all wink

like tiny shards of mirror flying past—

revealing the light’s invisible beaming through the air.

the wind pushes the snowflakes along

from behind, toward the East,

but I had never thought:

it’s drawing them in its wake as well,

from the West

—Well, it impels them, either way:

now with straight-line speed,

now in regular curves, roller-coastering, riding the tension between traveling wind

and gravity's down-draw home

each curvaceous line of white

ascends unseen slopes, cresting, diving, and again:

a wave now, as in radio-, as in micro-, as in gamma-

matter made energy by motion?

each spoked and faceted flake

—think about it!—

coin-flips, cartwheels, stalls and spins

its way through the rush forwards,

as a silver coin flops its irregular way down through water:

when one angled surface or the other

meets the light and bats! it to my eye

—it's matter again, made,

a particle as I observe,

destined to, with a flea-sized sound

of shattering ice,

strike against house or tree.

each flake winks at me

several times in its journey

from the right side of window one

to the left frame-edge of window two

…thousands, then, of winks—lifetimes.

I could have missed it.

Although I appreciate the snow, I really wish the view out my front window weren’t of houses and streets with their ugly gray slush, but of a rolling landscape, woods and meadows, river and horizon gladdened by their frosting of white.  I want the postcard, not the reality.  I can, however, appreciate snow and ice in an existential way, as the force opposing unbridled heat.  Heat is Yang, cold is Yin, and a cycling balance must exist between them.  In a nutshell, I’m glad Earth is not an oven, even if it means enduring Winter’s cold and drear.  In fact, the world as we know it today is the product of a succession of ice ages, the ages-old seesaw between freeze and thaw.  Far from being a deadly scourge, the ice spawned a stunning diversity of large, cold-hardy animals.  Many of them finally died out along with the glaciers themselves around 10,000 years ago, leaving us only the moose and bison here in the Lower 48.  What’s more, the glaciers have left ridiculously fertile soil in their wake, and the cold, snow and ice all keep germs, molds and tropical diseases at bay.  Ice is nice, if you take the long view.  When was the last time you thanked it?  I do not think I ever have, but one gift of writing is the way it helps you appreciate things you never thought much about before—so, hey, thank you, ice and snow and cold.  Thanks.  I hope that you thank them too, in your own way.

Thank you, too, snow pants and wool socks, scarf and hat.  When I came in from shoveling, I was not cold at all.  Au contraire, I was sweating profusely.  Then, when I stripped my upper body down to my long johns in the single-digit temps I was standing in the dark by the back porch light, and the water vapor was steaming off of me as if I were a boiling pot of water.  To think that, in warmer conditions, in spite of its intensity said evaporation would be invisible!

I will end on this note:  the next time we do get some good packing snow (on Sunday, Day Eleven, perhaps, the Festival of the Three Kings?), you need not limit yourself to making a traditional snowman.  One of my best winter memories is of making a snow ape on my front lawn.  I was pleased with the results, yes, but the best part was losing myself in the creative act.  For that time, I was in the Zone, and no worries.  It’s true that some random driver took the trouble to ride up on my lawn and smash my creation to bits, but I had already had my fun and bless him, I’ll bet he had his….Another time, I made a space alien.  The point is to lose yourself—or perhaps you are really being MORE yourself—in a creative act.  It’s a beautiful thing, but doesn’t have to be snow sculpture.  You could write a haiku about the snow, or like my wife make a bunch of paper snowflakes.  Unhook, I say, any concerns about the quality of the product and become one with the Process.

MUSICAL CHOICES: Too many to mention in the time allotted (the wife and child are now home), but a lot more snow-themed tracks besides “Frosty the Snowman” and “Let It Snow” can rock your snowbound socks off. “Snowman” by Bare Naked Ladies; “Snowblind” by Black Sabbath; and “Winter Snow” by Booker T. and the M.G.’s, to name just a few from the “groups starting with ‘B’” category.  Check ‘em out!

DAYS ELEVEN AND TWELVE OF CHRISTMAS

DAYS ELEVEN AND TWELVE: EVE OF EPIPHANY/FESTIVAL OF THE THREE KINGS; AND EPIPHANY/TWELFTH NIGHT

THE MAGI, HEROD, THE SLAUGHTERED INNOCENTS, AND THE BABY JESUS IN YOU!

Two days: one to celebrate the magi, and one the baby Jesus’ “striking appearance” (the meaning of epiphany) in the world.

The number of magi/kings/wise men/astrologers (depending on the translation) is not clarified in the gospels, only the number of gifts.  Nevertheless, legend fills in the blanks where myth leaves off.  So then there were three, their secret identities revealed by one version in this way: Caspar, a Turk,  is old, normally with a white beard, and gives the gold. Melchior is middle-aged, giving frankincense from his native Arabia, and Balthazar is a young man with myrrh from Yemen, although beginning in the 1100’s he has been depicted as a dark-skinned Ethiopian.

The canon establishes that an unknown number of Visitors on the Eve of Epiphany followed a star Bethlehem way and visited Herod the Great, King of Judea.  They innocently believed that the sovereign would be supportive of their quest and indeed of the Newborn King himself.  Playing dumb, but having every intention of impaling the infant on a sword, he sweetly asked them to let him know when they found the child so that he might pay homage himself.  They never did get back to him, having been warned by a dream not to, and left town on the sly.  Herod’s response: to kill all newborn Jews, a bloodbath earning the epitaph “the slaughter of the innocents,” and should have changed the Judean king’s name to “Horrid the Great Git”.  But he was evidently greater in his own mind than in reality, for the Baby Jesus escaped the others’ fate, his parents being warned, as had been the Magi, in a dream to get the hell out of Dodge-lehem.

So obviously Herod murdered everyone’s newborns after the magi had skipped town.  Even so, their fate is commemorated on the Third Day, Childermass, December 28^th, when it could not have been earlier than Jan. 7th. 

A thought experiment: let’s say that Herod represents the “ego”.  At its worst, this part of the psyche is a constellation of all our entrenched habits (and the ruts they are stuck in).  This part of self, a sort of gatekeeper, really, has no or limited access to vast areas of the soul-self.  Humility, Zen, mystical experience, true reverence, mental peace, or even any new habit may threaten it, and in fact the ego has been known to actively thwart any such novelties.  The overblown ego thinks that it is king, and fails to realize how small its ‘kingdom’ really is.

Further, say that the Nativity represents a breakthrough of heroic energy: a breakthrough of spiritual and psychological Stuff which is wider, deeper, higher and more central, all at once, than anything else experienced before.  The “innocents” whom Herod slaughtered represent ideas, feelings and actions flowing from this new and greater way of being.  The first reaction of the ego is Herod’s: to kill off all urges that threaten its tenure.  Stab them!  Slaughter them.  Or, what’s a more likely scenario today: watch TV and hope they go away. 

I had always thought that “Coventry Carol,” is hauntingly beautiful, and that the “bye, bye” part was not a literal goodbye but some medieval word with a different meaning.  If only: in this song, Hebrew mothers are bidding their barely-born and newly murdered sons adieu forever….

Lully, lullay, Thou little tiny Child,

Bye, bye, lully, lullay.

Lullay, thou little tiny Child,

Bye, bye, lully, lullay.

…It’s heart-rending.  I need not milk it, but I do propose that it’s also quite sad the number of divine stirrings within—intuitions or feelings of big love or noble actions—that have been ignored in a person’s life, and whose time may have come and gone.  What ideas arising from your very core are you killing off this lovely Christmas season?—To put it another way, if you were completely daring and secure, what would you do (or not do)? 

The story says that the Source of all those anxiety provoking promptings will not be killed, which means the ideas will keep on coming, which means you have to engage in some compulsive behavior or other, or they will catch up with you (‘Tis the season, traditionally, of compulsive shopping—but why limit yourself?).  Whereupon you will realize that you-as-ego are not a king at all, more like a clerk at a local hotel which may or may not be The Ritz.  More,  if you are lucky you will realize also that this is a very good thing, that there is more to you than the dog tricks you have learned to perform in response to the old master, fear.  Perhaps you will get that “there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” and you will see that the Wonder Child, source of all those promptings, is constantly reborn within us where the humble meets the exalted (where angels, for example, fly singing their hearts out over a barn full of animals and straw, and manure).

To support this Birth within yourself, make a habit of doing something every day that feeds your soul-self, your Newborn King (or Queen): follow your Bliss; remain quiet and still (don’t just do something—sit there!); feed yourself ideas that are hard to accept but are nevertheless true, like “the Divine is born in me”; if you find yourself in a rut, leave it the same way you would leave an unhealthy yet familiar relationship (kicking and screaming, if you’re like me); give up a resentment; meditate on what you might do (or not do), and see what bubbles up.  The Christmas Story would have us pay attention to our dreams; didn’t dreams protect the Divine Child’s life, not once but twice?  Of what are our dreams warning us, or what in our lives are they asking us to feed?

UNCOMMON THOUGHTS ON GIFTS AND GIVING

We can talk theologically about what the Magi’s gold, frankencense and myrrh represent, but let’s us just talk gifts and giving now.  For one, what IS the “ideal” gift for a certain person?  What gift will help lead a person further along on this journey called life, encouraging them to come into their own, somehow?  That, I propose, is the question. 

You know what Santa Claus brought my kid this year?  A pull-up bar, which is a great gift for Asher because my monkey boy goes stir crazy all the long Winter without any trees to climb.  And now, thanks to the irrespressible urge to leap up and grab it, he’s doing not just one but two full pullups at a time (which is 2 more than most kids his age can do), plus hanging, turning upside down, taking a tumble—all that good stuff.  Good call by the Jolly Old Elf, but then he himself fond of climbing up and down chimneys. 

M. Scott Peck, may he rest in peace with a pack of Marlbloros, insisted that love is doing (or giving, I would add here) anything that helps someone grow spiritually.  I would put forth the proposition that Asher, in learning that he can grow stronger through playful action, is growing spiritually.  He is finding his own way to improve at something, or rather refining an internal way that already has existed, which is better. 

I would also have you consider that giving a great gift means being willing to INVESTIGATE the issue.  In so doing, one uses all the tools for coming to any other important answer: think and write and pray about it, meditate on it, talk it over with others, pay attention to your dreams and/or those “limbo” thoughts you have in the morning between sleep and wakefulness, be attentive to synchronicities wherein the Gods are trying to get your attention.  Some would take a visit to the astrologer or Madame Romani and her tarot cards.  Whatever: the point is to FOCUS on the Quest, to give it your attention, and action.

What would benefit your loved ones the most?  What are their “immense needs of inner space”?  Remember that they themselves might not want to think about that:  “…To consider our real needs—the essential things we lack in our lives—is often too frightening, opening up an abyss of need that calls our very existence into question.”.  The gift you end up “giving” may not be in a wrapped box, it may be simply your presence, or a party, a nice massage, a change of scenery, a story that you memorize and tell them, an idea whose time has come—the sky really is the limit when the gift is from the best part of the giver to the best part of the receiver.  Ironically, gift giving time is a great one for thinking “out of the box”.

What you are looking for, in deciding on gifts, is an “epiphany”.  I use the term in the wider sense of a sudden, striking insight, in this case a glimpse into the essence of the person to whom you would like to give a gift (as Santa looked into Asher and saw “Monkey!”).  When life is getting my wife down to the point where she can’t get back up, if I am in my right mind I see that she should not even try to get up; she should stay down—and by that I mean lying down with me massaging her.  Since having that epiphany once after many unsuccessful attempts to “cheer her up,”, I know what to do.  Works every time.  I’ve even bought myself (I mean, her) a massage table.

The point is not just knowledge of the right gift.  In undergoing the systematic use of all your personal tools for revelation, you are also uncovering the best part of yourself—which, naturally, is the ideal part to be deciding what gifts to provide to others.  Who isn’t a better person herself after meditating on and actively pursuing the gift that would benefit another person the most?  Especially if my suspicion is true: that the very best gifts involve the element of personal sacrifice on the part of the giver.

One thing that might be happily sacrificed is one’s own limitations, which might well be based on one’s own relatively low opinion of oneself.  It has been said that one can receive only that which one can accept.  If you truly believe that you get what you desereve—and deserve very little, at that, for whatever reason—then it makes sense that subconsciously you will avoid any greater good because you would be uncomfortable with the having of it.  It’s one thing to be frugal in the interest of humility, or the clarity that comes without the clutter of stuff, or a concern to remain small in ecological footprint; but it’s quite another to be constricted out of a sense of unworthiness.  Here I should amplify the concept of “gifts” that one might receive to include some more internal in nature:  peace, love, faith, the ability to freely express joy and grief, acceptance, determination.  So it may be that someone does not feel they deserve or can afford a nicer house, or it may also be that they do not feel they deserve or can afford peace of mind.

I say all this because I suspect that our own small-mindedness, the result of seeing all through the tightened aperture of a weak self-image or imagination, cannot help but restrict as well the quality of our Quest to find the Perfect Gift for our beloveds.  Remember Parcifal, the naïve knight who, when presented with the whole shabang—the wounded Fisher King, the Grail Castle, and even the Holy Grail itself—made it all disappear even though all he had to do was ask one little question.  He’d failed to ask it because someone had taught him it was rude to ask questions—and as much because he didn’t know he was up to the task of breaking a rule meant for small situations for the sake of a much greater one.   By contrast, in the fairy tale “The Devil’s Sooty Brother,” the title character spends seven years without bathing sweeping the ashes and feeding the fires in hell.  As a result, he looks awful, covered with soot and funk and shunned by others.  Even so, the Devil instructs him to say, if anyone should ask his identity, “I am the devil’s sooty brother, and my king as well!”  He goes on to win the king’s daughter and kingdom.  Parcifal was all decked out in a knight’s armored splendor, but failed thanks to seeing himself as a sort of pawn without the right to speak; the sooty brother saw himself as a king and ended up one rich in “gold” (symbolizing wholeness and connection to the Divine). 

So have the epiphany: you are a king, a queen—at the very least master of yourself by divine birthright. January 6^th, the Feast of the Epiphany, can be seen as the world’s having its “sudden, striking insight”:  far from forsaking us, the Divine is among us, even in us.  There’s an epiphany for you.

Here’s an idea whose time has come: take a break from the rat race and make a list of your own needs, and the needs of the people on your X-mas list.  This is one way to mind what Lillie Tomlin said about the rat race: “Even if you win, you’re still a rat.”.  Now, give yourself, and them, one thing from the lists made.  Don’t stop: since Christmas (so sayeth the clergy) should last throughout the year, make this a habit!

TWELFTH NIGHT CUSTOMS, AND WHERE HAVE ALL THE PARTIES GONE?

As for Twelfth Night customs, I can tell you what happens in Spain and other places in the present day: January 6^th is when the kids get their Christmas presents, not Christmas Day, and they are brought by the Three Kings, not by the roly-poly Man In Red.  The kids know all of the “Wise Kings’” names and faces.  I believe the children fill their shoes with straw and leave them out for the Kings’ camels, exactly the way the Old Norse would leave straw out for Sleipnir, Odin The All-Father’s flying eight-legged horse, or the way we leave cookies and milk for Santa Claus and his flying eight reindeer.  As in some other places, the Spanish make an Epiphany cake, into which they bake a small figure or plastic toy, or a bean.  Whoever gets the piece with the bean/toy is declared King, and gets to preside over the festivities.  In merry Old England, the King/Queen had the honor of leading all attending the Twelfth Night party in songs and games. 

In Spain today, controversy has ensued over the recent inclusion of Santa Claus (Papá Noel) in their pantheon, as evidenced by an article forwarded to me by a native Spaniard urging his nation to reject The Man With The Bag and retain the Three Kings as the bringers of gifts and bearers of Spanish culture.  We shall see how that turns out.

I’m glad I don’t live in Bulgaria.  There they throw a crucifix into an icy cold river, and the first one to fish it out receives a special blessing (and good health for the family, they say).  But even if you avoid volunteering  for polar diving, you might be one of the men dancing in the same freezing waters to inaugurate the crucifix ritual.

In the British Isles of yore, Twelfth Night parties are when people pulled out all the stops for one last, grand hurrah….That is, after they had disposed of all the Christmas decorations.  Wreaths and holly garlands, the mistletoe were consigned to the fire—any holly spine left unburnt would turn into a goblin!  During the subsequent festivities, “All the world are Kings and Queens.  Everybody is somebody else; and learns at once to laugh at, and to tolerate, characters different from his own by enacting them—all conspires to throw a giddy splendour over the last night of the season.”

Sounds great, doesn’t it?  The most festive thing I and my little fambly did was watch the birds at the bird feeders (finches and cardinals—lots of red!).  I shovelled snow in the head-cracking cold.  We ate dinner and hung out, I with my family and my family with my headache.  You can guess that I wasn’t very good company.  Katrina did make some delicious bread to eat with our leftovers, but it was all pretty mellow.  I didn’t even think about the Three Kings until I sat down to write this…

Have you read Barbara Ehrenreich’s book about the history of communal celebration (Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy)?  You must!  The gist of this book: through the history of our ‘civilization,’ the amount of time devoted to revelry has been whittled down to a sliver, and the nature of our carousing has toned way down as well.  People used to, as Eddie Murphy sang “party all the time”.  I read somewhere that the Romans had 175 festival days a year.  At one time, even churches lacked bolted-down benches and were often used as party halls, with dancing and singing.  Imagine!  This was in the days before the joke: “Why don’t Christians have sex standing up?—Because it might lead to dancing.”.  You couldn’t have gotten a laugh with that one before the Puritans—because nobody had thought to prohibit dancing yet, and full-throated merriment was still OK in God’s eyes. 

I guess my point is, in this case as in many others, I’m all for turning back the clock and extending our celebrations, making them merrier and more meaningful.  This is why I love the Twelve Days of Christmas (really fourteen counting Christmas Eve and Christmas Day—and you have to).  Even if I don’t have a bunch of Old English friends with which to carry on for these two weeks, they do give me more chance to reflect, and they have given me at least more opportunities to celebrate with my American friends and family.  I hope in the future they give me even more.  What’s else, I hope that you, reader, faithful and tireless (which you certainly are, if you have read all my twelve days’ worth of posts), are there to celebrate with me.