Cosmic Reflections

After a full week of ‘weather,’ we can finally see the sun rising above the bank of grey clouds pushing off to the east.
        Perhaps now the solar lights can power up enough to stay on beyond the first hour of darkness; perhaps we too will be re-energized with the sun: we’ve become sluggish, trending towards the long winter’s nap named in ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas. A Christmas email from an east coast friend updates me on his annual struggle with Seasonal Affective Disorder.
        No wonder other species hibernate for the winter!
In fact, we’ve just exchanged presents over cocoa and cookies with friends who have a pet desert tortoise. Tad disappeared into his burrow shortly after the fall equinox and will remain there, snug and sound, until sometime next spring. But over this rainy week Kathy has been fielding frantic phone calls from other tortoise owners with flooding burrows.
       We are the species meant to stay awake!
   Creative awareness and conscious responsibility ARE our gifts from, of, by, for, and to the Universe.
     Thus, at the midnight of the year, we shall try to stay awake, keeping watch as a way to celebrate the great turning of the northern hemisphere of earth back towards our sun.
     So of course the major element will be Light. A variety of candles grace a small round table: though they differ in size and shape, they are all deeply red for the joy of the moment!
    We spend the waning daylight selecting readings to share after dinner. Then, while is Milt preparing the Herdman ham (see: Barbara Robinson’s The Best Christmas Pageant Ever) and with Christmas music playing on the stereo, all the solar powered lights magically come on at the very moment the pink streaks of sunset fade from the sky.
     There’s also a sense of magic when we light all the candles: the ordinary is transfigured by the collective glow.
     Yes! This is the season of transformation: from darkness to light and from death to life. Yet while all creatures living in the northern hemisphere of the planet sense this shift on some level, we the people are the symbolic species. We take this annual natural occurrence and weave it into beloved narratives of human experience, from Scrooge and the Grinch to Charlie Brown’s friends and all the Herdmans (especially Imogene).
Something can happen that mysteriously changes everything!
    As Howard Thurman so beautifully put it in one of my favorite readings for the evening:
     “There must always be in everyone’s life some place for that which in itself is breathlessly beautiful, throwing all the rest of life into a new and created relatedness, something that gathers up all the freshets of experience from drab and commonplace areas of living and glows in one bright light of penetrating beauty and meaning—then passes. The commonplace is shot through now with a new glory—old burdens become lighter and ancient wounds lose much of their old, old hurting. A crown is placed over our heads that for the rest of our lives we are trying to grow tall enough to wear.”
     As we begin our private celebration that will include this piece, the waning moon rises in the window frame, and rather than imagining Santa riding across it I mentally picture the Christmas Eve astronauts orbiting it and looking back at us.
     Either way, its reflected light reminds us that the sun is the true source of the season’s festivities: our star is ‘out there’ whether we can see it or not. So we’ve included two star shaped candles, along with an array of glow in the dark ones. Simultaneously transcendent and immanent, the sun’s light makes our lives possible, and the recognition of that quickens our spirits in the silence of the long dark night.
     We are awake and up way too early, like two children. Relighting the candles, we open presents in the dim light of our first Christmas together. It is still before dawn when we bundle up and drive out to a favorite out door perch that has a view of the whole eastern horizon. At the summer solstice, the sun is as far along the northern edge of the valley as it will ever be; now we wait and watch to see where it will appear on this day that ends the winter solstice. It rises farther south than we’d realized, reminding us that the southern hemisphere is enjoying summer while we are shivering in this cold morning.
      Now our days will begin growing longer, the nights shorter and once again we’ve participated in the dance of the cosmos.