I wrote this long winded essay several years ago after I was hurt and angry with some friends during the holidays and was trying to make peace with them, the Baby Jesus, Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future, and with myself. I thought I’d dust it off and post it here. It’s still too long even though I’ve given it a couple edits, needs more.
Noche Buena
“Where is He who has been born King of the Jews? For we have seen His star in the Eastand have come to worship Him.”
-Matthew 2:2
“Light casts shadows. Darkness, what does it give? My son, don’t avoid what darkness offers. Seek after it.”
-Iyá Marinete Martins de Souza
In December I grow tired. Every year it seems the same; in November’s fading light my mood descends with the temperatures, darkens with the lengthening of nights, and disappears with the tree sap, so, by Christmas, I’m usually gloomy, miserable really. All the holiday cheer and carols echo in a chilly distance, a hollowing out between myself and humanity in its exultant celebration, its clamor, its shopping and feasting, its natural, unexamined fun. I feel sullen, Grinchy, put out, somewhat indignant, and alone. Yet as I listen I know that I am not alone, underscoring and traipsing behind the holiday parties and preparations I hear a grumbling, a whining that is familiar and seemingly welcomed, almost as part of the rituals of Christmas itself. We hear complaints and constant bemoaning of what trouble it all is, how unnecessary, how commercial, and how annoying. So empty, banal, unspiritual, materialistic, false. And forced. Almost everyone has something bad to say about “the holidays.”
Few it seems, can endure December’s ritual regimen without, at some point in the course of the festivities, feeling some amount of bitter complaint, critique, or hesitant reserve. So much of Christmas past has failed us but this grumbling, this, if nothing else, we can count upon. If not the comfort and joy of Christmas, this dissatisfaction we can rely upon; if only in our disquiet and disdain of Christmas we can join with others. And this joining, this seems to be the imperative of the season, both Scrooge and Grinch, with their shrunken, frosted over hearts learned it, felt it, gave it. They became joiners in the end. To not be left out, to give and receive the Gift, to have the merriest of Christmases, to be swept up in the Angels’ Gloria en excelsis, extreme, excess glory. Wasted glory, perhaps. So, as I listen to people about town, it seems unhip, uncool, un-PC, and actually, brainlessly piggy to actually enjoy Christmas outright, happily. If I feel good about Christmas, I feel bad. If I feel bad about it I feel smart, some kind of wise…but I still feel bad. Christmas sucks. Christianity sucks. Religion sucks. Human society sucks. Humanity that foists such costly ritual on us that should hold, comfort, and heal us but really just leaves us deflated, sullen, used and disappointed. Looking at the bloody course of human history we can’t even begin to count the bodies that have been slaughtered so that we can have Christmas. This tinsel, these roasted hams, It’s a Wonderful Life.
Christmas is like fashion; everyone has to get dressed, to wear something, so no matter what you choose to wear, even if you choose to wear nothing at all, you’re still making a choice, still making a statement. And one that matters, that will be read by others, one that places in you in a relationship with others. Like it or not. Unavoidable, inevitable. No way out. No exit. God Bless Ye Merry Gentlemen. Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. Ralph Lauren. Gautier. Prada. What Child Is This? The hegemony of Christian culture. Really.
Now, for me, by the Christmassy time of the year, it all smothers and chokes, like the overheated living rooms full of friends and family, like perfectly healthy sapling pines cut down and globbed up with tinsel and gunk, dying a slow death in the suburban plunder of a planet aching, gagging on landfill and toxic waste, global warming forcing tacky red and green poly-fiber sweaters with snowflake appliqués off of overfed, fattened bodies to fall upon a king size bed hosting a landscape of overcoats and furs as more guests arrive to another redundant party like a million others to throw paper plates of half eaten food into the garbage, garbage filled with wrapping paper, cards from forgotten (or forgettable) relatives and friends, whole fruit cakes left unopened and (thankfully) uneaten. Family and friends, expectations and dreams of candy canes and sugar plums, then memories, disappointment, shame, guilt, anger, isolation, pain.
“Its coming on Christmas
They’re cutting down trees
They’re putting up reindeer
And singing songs of joy and peace
I wish I had a river
I could skate away on…
…I wish I had a river so long
I would teach my feet to fly
Oh I wish I had a river.”
-Joni Mitchell
Having grown up mostly in the desert Southwest of the United States I know nothing of how to ice skate so I choose to simply walk. At some point I always have to get out, to fly. I put on my coat and try politely to slip out, “I’m just going for a walk…indigestion…” Confused, I hide my feelings even from myself; I’m overwhelmed and move out on impulse more than anything. It’s usually night, because in December there’s so much more night, like Glory, it too unfolds in excess, on and on it seems to go, to the edges of earth and heaven. Here in the Northern Hemisphere at Christmas we’re swamped in darkness and sleep, lethargy, endless colds and flu, and long, ruminating walks for me seem part and parcel with the longer nights. On the West Coast, here in San Francisco, it’s chilly but not freezing, sometimes wet, no snow; we have bright skies but the night feels powerfully empty and, in the moment of my escape from the festivities, for these nights I am grateful. And the cold too, it seems so welcoming after the eggnog and booze have left me over-full and queasy. I enjoy feeling gratitude for something so simple, so uncomfortable. Air, empty of heat, voices, scent. Then silence. December’s nights can be so quiet. After and beyond, beneath and behind the laughing, a space, no carols, no squelched arguments, just empty quiet. You have to step out, but it’s there. Even in the city’s noisy streets, in December, if you put on your coat and push out of the party, you can find this silence.
“On a dark night,
Fired with love’s urgencies inflamed
Ah, the sheer grace of it!
I left without being noticed…”
-John of the Cross
Gratitude for these nights, the cold, the silence, and later, perhaps, for the return home, but now on my walkabout away from parties and get-togethers, the gratitude of this loneliness. A river so long…I could skate away.
Here at age 43 I’ve lived my life in such a way that there are fewer and fewer Christmas parties to go to, fewer exposures to Christmas programs, services, pageants, few, if any, family gatherings. Almost no carols. No shopping. No cards. None of it. At age 17 I came out as a “Neo-Pagan witch” and let it be known, especially to my family, that I didn’t celebrate Christmas anymore…I celebrated Yule, the winter solstice celebrations of ancient Northern Europe, and that if they (my family) wanted to give me presents I’d accept them, but not to expect anything in return. “It’s just a patriarchal Christian propaganda. It’s all just landfill waiting to happen; sacrificing the entire planet to the lie of the God-on-a-Stick.” Sweet, the idealism of youth. Yet, even with the mellowing sag of middle-age, my convictions about Christmas still linger: Christianity and the dominant culture of the United States hold our lives here in a smug hegemony. Resistance seems futile.
With my fall into paganism came other surprises for family and friends: at 22 I came out as a gay man. Distance from family became automatic and even if I deigned to be physically present for a family Christmas my mind and heart were filled with thoughts, feelings, and dreams that would never make it on Santa’s list. My sexuality placed me safely on another planet. Like the Little Prince of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry I had a long journey ahead, through many planets and through the lives of so many people, only to discover that it didn’t matter what planet I was on, that “the eyes are blind. One must look with the heart.” Physically I also wandered far, I spent many student loans traveling during my twenties and thirties across Latin America while spiritually I traipsed in and out of a variety of spiritual traditions and my sojourning would slowly reveal a deeper truth to me. Even as I clung to the fears, wounds, angers and resentments from my childhood, whose original source may have been my family and then, secondarily, the American public school system, but which then became projected and globalized onto the socio-political situation of the world, I wandered about bitter over the sad “state of the world” and, unable to cope with the bitter blood that seeped from my insides, unable to even taste it, let alone suffer the work of the Winemaker that would transform its sourness into the subtlety of wine. I simply stumbled forth, on and on. My personal, romantic, and professional lives basically unlived, wandered through. A shopper afraid to buy a present for fear of it being unworthy, unappreciated.
I would, however, spend the majority of my young adult life becoming increasingly involved with Brazilian Candomblé and, in 1993, was initiated as a priest in the tradition. I now dedicate the majority of my “ritual time” celebrating holidays and Gods few North Americans have ever heard of, or care to know about. I have flown far away from the shores of my native culture, far from the canned Christmas carols droning in the background of malls while families of shoppers argue and strain under the burden of “Advent,” in the heavy labor of which everyone seems to secretly hope it would miscarry or abort. So often, while white Christmases were stranding holiday travelers in airports across the Midwest, I’d be in South America, basking in the rich, tropical heat, duteously studying the arcana of African Orisha spirits, their rituals and myths, their secret liturgy hidden in seeds, leaves, and the sweat and convolutions of ecstatic dances. I could have almost forgotten about Santa, about Christmas trees, about babies in mangers. I could have forgotten about kissing under mistletoe, forgotten the oranges covered in cloves dangling from beautiful red satin ribbons, forgotten the reflection of Christmas lights off snow banks and icicles.
But how did this happen? This self-conscious refutation and rejection of Christmas, Christianity, of family and heritage, of America, of good clean fun?
I remember loving Christmas as a child. I remember waking up so early and racing my sister to the tree, waiting so eagerly to rip the paper from the boxes, to taste rum spiked hot chocolate. I remember writing a Christmas play for my Sunday school class to stage. I remember making sugar cookies. I remember dancing in the Nutcracker ballet wearing baggy leotards. I remember a photo of myself so happy with my Oscar the Grouch puppet, tinsel glittering in the background upon gorgeous, green boughs. A “classic” experience of Christmas in the late 1960’s and 70’s, but what I’d very carefull and thoroughly forgotten was my father leaving on December 26th, 1975. Forgot that he packed up a few things and departed from our home, divorcing my mother, and, even though he’d live less than 30 minutes away and visit regularly, he had left. My child’s mind, so pragmatic, thought, “Left us for something, someplace, somebody better than this place, than us, than me.” So for years, swathed in forgetfulness, the Light of Christmas, the Light of the blessed, was some place else, some place other, some place better, more worthy. It was not mine. Not with me. And I was not of it.
I became divided that Christmas; I would be both, simultaneously, at the party, gathered with everyone around the tree, and also, grabbing my coat and heading out the door. One broken part of me sought to remain where I was, to love my family and our place, my home, my mother, my self. Another wanted to follow him, to be with him in that other place, that better place for which he’d left us. Another part began to seek out another place altogether, someplace enchanted, sublime, aesthetic and spiritual, away from my family and my father, a place of Light away from this ugliness where I was. Another part of me died to the light and sought only night, darkness, infinity, nothingness. Years I have walked with these different impulses pulling and pushing my wandering feet in many directions, varied agendas and schemes in my mind, and my heart swallowed in mysterious dark. Each of these parts with its own logic, its reason, yet none of them sane, none of them whole, none of them ever quite taking complete control. I thought I was alone, unique in my fractured fairytale of a holiday but I know now that I wasn’t and am not. Almost all of us share such divisions, our hearts severed and divided by wounds in our past, our present confused and labyrinthine, the future even more so; we all wrestle with Light and Dark. We all love and hate Christmas, the nativity of God, the birth of new possibility. We all wander perplexed, seeking to join and not join, to go home for the holidays and to wait for someone to come home to us; to get out and to fit in. To be at home and to get away. To be free. To be sought, wanted, to be precious. To be gold, frankincense and myrrh. To hold the perfect one. To be held.
Winter’s mounting darkness awakens my old wounds, swamps me in their contradictions, and broadsides me using memories that rouse sleeping ghosts, ancient and familial. The ritual of Christmas, allegedly designed to distract us from such pain, or awaken us to Mystery and let us see beyond our fear of Winter’s strife, so often just antagonizes or re-inflicts these wounds, and rather than act as balm or cure, Christmas seems more of a wound itself, becomes a wound apart and beyond the wounds from which we’d ask it to protect or heal us. In this manifestation of Christmas there is no Mystery, just a colossal drag of shopping, familial obligation, work parties, and, in the end, extra expenses to be paid in the New Year’s first round of bills. Disappointments and resentments. Or, if and when we’re “lucky”, it’s a merry blur of fun and food and lots of presents and Santa’s winter wonderland dreaming of a white Christmas just like the one’s we used to know or, if we’re still more lucky, not.
As I go about during Christmas time in San Francisco, the streets are full of immigrants and self-styled cultural rebels. “And what if I weren’t raised Christian?” I think, “Or if I weren’t raised in the U.S. with all this shit, this crazy consumerist mania? How would I feel about Christmas? What meaning would it hold for me? What battles would I fight with it?” I remember my Cuban friend Regla Albaran. A santera, also a worshiper of African Orishas, I remember how during her first Christmas here in the U.S. she went out to Wal-Mart and bought hundreds of dollars worth of Christmas decorations and lights. Her front yard was a winter wonderland like I’m sure she’d never seen in Cuba. She, a “pagan,” a Socialist, a sensible well-educated adult, reveled in the American dream of Christmas.
For the sake of my Orishas, my pagan Gods, for the sake of my sanity, for Christ’s sake, I sought to rebuke Christmas forever. (How I sometimes wish that I could have rebuked ritual and religion entirely!) Ritually, I’d leave the family dinners or work Christmas parties early, grab my coat and, saying, making my excuses, I’d head out. It’s Christmas 2007 and I’m still out. I still find that despite my conscious rejection of the importance and relevance of Christmas to my life, my decision to not celebrate it “with the herd”, every year come Christmas, I’m still moody and generally depressed. I make the obligatory calls to my family; pleasant chit-chat and the sound of kids in the background. Friends leave town on spontaneous trips to fabulous places and San Francisco empties out. I feel emptied. I know that whatever I do, whether I follow my friends or stay home, if we meet up for drinks later or not, I’ll feel the same. I try to blame them for this place I am. Try to blame them for the leaving. Yet I know each of us leaves, stays. Each of us confronts Christmas. Each of us, at some point or another, walks out. With John of the Cross’s “sheer grace of it” or not.
Night. Cold. Silence.
Now, as I walk out alone through San Francisco’s bare winter streets hanging in the night there are those lights. Unavoidable, they’re everywhere. Even on a highway driving in the endless western expenses of the United States you can see them in the huge distance, forming patterns of stars and trees, or reindeer or just in strings. Colored. Beautiful reds. Deep, entrancing blues. Or brilliant yellows. Some glowing, flashing…some tiny and twinkling, others beaming. Christmas lights. Like giant glitter chunks. Like celestial fruit, radiant and untouchable. Silly lights really. They seem, from a rational view, purely wasteful. Electricity wasted on night, on a vain ritual of denial, gluttony, greed, conformity. Some strung up on trees like some bizarre supernatural fruit or berries. Others like candles, snow-flakes, or shooting stars, guiding stars. Some around windows, across fences, over roofs, around mailboxes. Goofy lights. Somehow, they don’t bother me. Rather than interrupt my solitude, they join in. Quietly, with me.
Around the trees of my street strands of lights wind up, spiraling, redefining their trunks in darkness with their freaky colored light: pink and green, white like snowflakes, pulsating gold. One strand of bulbs that blinks in a strange rhythm, undulating and snakelike, while another’s are glowing bluish white, plastic crucifixes curling through the branches. Down the street two Santa figures embrace like lovers, lights surround them like a spider web halo.
Senseless, but sensual, they are out here, fearless in the dark. Winter lights are promising lights, fragile and precarious, they awaken a mother’s protective caring; we’ll cradle this light, hold it close, cherish it and see it kept safe till Spring’s Return. Winter lights are about safety, warmth. Christmas lights, at their simple best, honor such humanity; in their luminescence like mythic Angels they announce what darkness has held within its self gestating for so long…a tenderness, a willingness, a giving of light, just possibility. So, not just cute, they can be threatening on some level, could be dangerous.
A half life-sized plastic crèche scene before a church. A group of teenagers steal the baby and run laughing into the dark. Photos are sent back to the church from time to time over the course of the next year; Jesus appears at frat parties, punk shows, biology lectures, on a road trip, in a high chair sitting up to a Thanksgiving turkey, and finally, on December 24th he reappears at the crèche, snuggled up close to his plastic replacement twin, their little faces glowing.
What I love about Christmas lights is that they don’t seek to diminish the night, to put it out, to conquer it or deny it, rather they decorate it. The Light of Christmas, Saint Lucia’s flames, the “Christ Light,” isn’t at war with the darkness, rather it shines through it, has its beauty, meaning, and purpose in and because of it, the darkness. While my personal struggles, in the greater scheme of things, have been miniscule small, such light as these don’t ask me to trivialize it, nor aggrandize it, just to walk in it, to shiver in it, to shine in it. These lights seem more than anything, to give praise to the night, to worship it, to love it. Even as they break its vast relentless expanse they seem to exalt the night, pouring into it with their very being, which is night’s contradiction. In the world and of it, Light is its own contradiction, requiring no proofs. Infinite, yet particular, mine. Yours. Ours. Everyone’s.
A friend and I walk at about 5pm. It’s already getting dark. We laugh at how strange it is when the days are so short. Funny, it’s been this way our whole lives, since the beginning of time. We’re still kind of surprised. Because it’s a holiday and we don’t have to work in the morning, we have a cup of coffee and watch the people come in and out of the night.
Christmas lights without night, without some cold, without silence have little meaning, no real existence without Winter; they wouldn’t shine as they do in anything but the long halcyon nights…the nights of our woundedness, nights of memories and frustration, nights of confusion, our refusal of joining with the nauseating party inside closed doors or our surrender and joy at stepping inside. Christmas lights are playful lights, tiny lights. With Christmas lights there is no judgment, no shadows cast. Their illumination doesn’t do away with our confusion, hurt and ignorance, and our despair; they do not eradicate our enemy, our dilemma, they do not condescend, condemn nor condone. They shine for pure pleasure, existential joy.
In a window in Chinatown on the edge of North Beach there is a star shaped arrangement of lights blinking spastically, frenetically, and I see children jumping up and down behind it in the reddish glow. They must be jumping on a bed or trampoline. No one stops them. They go on and on.
While our darkness seems tremendous, infinite and inevitable, and while at times our history seems nothing but a recollection of failures or a premonition of apocalyptic doom, Christmas lights stretch out into our fear and seem to reach through our alienation like strings of galaxies reach through cavernous, monstrous space, strands of stars and worlds, planets and little lives lived one after another, one upon another, like beads of a garland, like popcorn chains, strewn through nothingness, decking the halls of eternally empty, meaningless void. This strange Milky Way rolls forth in angelic glory, in divine excess, gaudy and blinking, line upon line one plugged into another, threatening electric fire but, nonetheless, still blinking. From between the reflected shadows between my feet on the wet pavement, in my theological, drunk head that can’t wait to get home and write this all down, on up to the heights of all space and time, to the highest height of heaven, they keep blinking…
I have a cord of old lights from decades past, with big round bulbs that are slowly burning out one by one. On my porch they cast a luscious light; it paints my living room gently. I’m sure they can also be seen by my neighbors all around. “What will happen,” I wonder, “when the last one goes? Where will I buy replacement bulbs?”
In and out, little lights, here then gone, then back again. They keep me company as I walk along, my breath making clouds, galaxies of sighs fading in instants. Creation and destruction, inspiration and exhalation, my companions, in and out, keep blinking. My eyes sting and twinkle and the heart strikes, nostalgia follows like shepherds to the Angel’s announcement, Memory, Hope, and Yearning arrive like Magi their hands already so full of gifts, and a star in the East orients me to the center of the world, of history, of humanity, of myself: the babe in the feeding trough born to nothing, to live, to love, to lose, and to die, to rise and come again, blinking. Blinking and blinking, this small, little, inconsequential Light only itself and like so many others. All of us on a string, yet still singular, unique, precious, shining in the night, the echoing of my wandering feet in the empty, open, long-armed night. I could skip, or dance, cry or laugh. I almost giggle. I blush. I keep walking.
I walk with friends and strangers in a procession. It’s called “Unsilent Night.” It’s an art event. Every year this guy composes beautiful ambient music on CD’s and tapes, giving them out to anyone who shows up who bring a boom-box, he shouts “Play!” over a bullhorn and everyone presses PLAY and it goes from there. As we walk through the Mission district the sound creeps everywhere. People lean out of their houses to hear it. There are no real words, no message, just the pleasure of being together in this music, in this night.
This Light is ancient and new. Baby Light drawing those around Him in from the shadows. Not just light, it shines further, it giggles and cries; it is a view, a value, a feeling, a yearning. This Light in the night has feeling, or, maybe it’s that I feel it and this feeling is the Light I’m really talking about, and, perhaps all these lights and feelings are, in the wider view of both Science and Scripture, the same light, squiggles of energy as it pours itself forth into the gaping infinity of time and space, simply resounding, wound up together in the entropy of all things, blinking, twinkling. Giggling. Crying. Redeeming.
“I put up lights in my room but I couldn’t reach very high so they’re just kind of thrown into the window. I put more around the mirror. I covered the mirror up because I don’t like looking at myself, too many messages; I put tinfoil over it and then my stuffed Sponge Bob Squarepants doll. He’s waving helloooo. Well, now he’s got a marquee around him.” She laughs like a child, embarrassed and delighted.
“Why did you choose lights?” I ask.
“When you’re going through what I’m going through, this civil rights case, my conversion and the holy robes, my father’s death, all at once, you need to have SOMETHING and I like the lights because they’re bright. They’re happy and the whole room looks happy, every part of it…and they’re easy to deal with. You just put them up and plug them in.”
On and on, over and over again, through the ages, this Light; I don’t see it as only Christmas, not just “Christian”. It’s both natural and supernatural, supra-natural to what we see as natural; praeternatural, yet “born again” of natural, organic, human heads, cradled in the dark chamber of the eye, of the heart. Heathen and pagan, Solstice rituals of inner and outer fertility conjured and cajoled this Light, primordial and primal, shaping the evolution of our eyes and hearts that could perceive It, feed and share It. This Light was before Scriptures, revealed to us from within them, outside of them writing them, fulfilling them, and then, sometimes simply lost to those that worship them as closed books and put paper and dogma between themselves and this Light. No religion nor dogma, no sacred text or Bible defines or restrains this Light, for such are just books on a shelf until this Light and eyes open them, give their Light to the world, into the dark, unleashed, and shining. No religion or dogma, just blinking lights.
A client of mine, a depressed woman who lives on Social Security in a single room occupancy hotel, who shares a bathroom down the hall with a dozen other people on her floor, known for her anger and furious verbal attacks, tells me, in a hushed whisper, that I can buy Christmas lights for half-price at Walgreens, “and those cute miniature trees too.” Her face glows as if already illuminated with them even as she tells me. I wonder where her anger went, where it comes from.
No one owns this light, let alone my impatient head obstinately rejecting the brightness of holidays and humanity that would hold me, if only too tightly, if only to let me go. To avoid this pain I have felt I had to be smarter, wiser. I’ve spent so much of my life becoming and trying to be the Wise Man, to be understanding, initiated, to know the Mystery (or rather, to out smart it.) But wise men read many signs, and following the Star they keep asking after the King. “Where is He who has been born King of the Jews?” And while they may know many omens, ancient and fantastic oracles, such wise men come to see that all these point to a natural, simple truth: in giving one receives. “…we have seen His star in the East and have come to worship Him.” This mystery: Out of darkness light is born, so simple, so complex, this gift.
Simple people, who have little wisdom, knowledge, belief, or adherence to faith, or, as is more often the case, too much of all these, put up Christmas lights. Complex people, equivocating the nature of Christmas, of light and dark, they too hang up lights. Jews and Pagans, Hindus and Buddhists, Muslims and Confucians, agnostics and atheists: all full of lights, this same Light I say. Each different. Each blinking, crazy in the night.
This modern folklore of plastic strands ripe with electric light’s glimmering creating crazy new shapes and forms, reiterating old, ancient themes, both cliché and fantastical, in the randomness of night intimates and defines some larger archetypal pattern, some living force, a Body Electric. The Sun’s body reborn, some call it Christ’s body; a beautiful, greening body full of promise, sexy and strong, full of feeling, a body I can be at home in. Light that is at home in me. In each of us. A thousand points of light. In these lights, in this Light, no judgment or greed, just giving, just the gift of Light itself, of ourselves, of and to each other, to and from the night, to the Light, to giving. A body no one could leave, no one could let go of. A body we all crave, even as we are its multi-fabulous manifestation.
The great, official lights of the Christmas tree and the Hanukah menorah at Union Square, of Macy’s windows, the tasteful lights on City Hall, the chic lights of catered concerts and parties, that opalescent light beaming unrivaled from the Transamerica building, all these alongside the cheap, dime store lights bought last minute to throw on a bent plastic tree propped up for the Holiday party at a drop-in center for the homeless, their dinner served on plastic trays, the kind used in jails. I’d like to rage at the discrepancy, the injustice of it; I want to rage at the waste of it all. And I will…but because of these lights, all of them, not in spite of them, not any of them.
Christmas lights are everywhere. The light of eyes, of smiles, of homes in winter, of hearths and hearts holding gem-like embers till dawn, of stars far above the cold, these lights are ancient, eternal, ever-present, and ubiquitous: infinite. No one owns them alone; no one “seals” their truth, no one stuffs it full of toys from the mall, no sales or discounts, no holiday getaway vacation deals, nothing orthodox or fundamentalist, nothing evangelical or New Age, just giving. We get off our high horses and camels, stooping down we behold what is precious…not because we are right to do so, or wise, but because our hearts have been opened, our love begins.
“You hang them up and they’re just fabulous. You pay the bill in January and know that it was WORTH IT.”
We give to this light, delight in it (or not).
“That is all.” The night seems to say. “That’s what I’ve got.”
Dark night. Noche buena.
Aníbal Mejía: Out from the Storm Cloud 