... the close and holy darkness ...

"One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six ...

... I got into bed.  I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept."

(Dylan Thomas)

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It snowed a little bit last night, as promised, before I went to bed.  We've had no snow to speak of until now.  When I woke up at 4 a.m. this morning, there was only a dusting of snow.  Just now I looked out again in the darkness and see that it is snowing steadily. 

December is full of celebrations from numerous traditions and days that are meaningful to me because of what happened in my life on those days.  It is a joy to celebrate all of the days in December, including those of Hanukkah, Bodhi Day, Winter Solstice, Christmas, Kwanzaa, and Ramadan when it occurs in December.

And then a New Year begins in January.

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Always sending love to blog friends near and far.

THIS MUST BE THE DAY

Today is the first day of Kwanzaa (Umoja = Unity), the first of the twelve days of Christmas and the 5th day of Hanukkah. The 6th day of Hanukkah begins at sunset.

Some mornings look better in black, white and grey.

"This must be the day that all of my dreams come true."
(Bob Dylan)

And just after sunset:

TRADITIONS / RED-WINGED BLACKBIRDS

When our mother was alive, she always sent wreaths she ordered from Starcross Community to my two sisters and me. My wreath always arrived on December 1, and I would hang it on the outside wall next to my front door until Valentine's Day. In 1994, the year she died unexpectedly on December 3, no wreath had arrived. I've wondered why she didn't send a wreath that year. Did she know she was going to die? For the next year, I continued her tradition by ordering a wreath. When our mother met our father, she was a church secretary in an Episcopal church. Our father had been raised as a Lutheran in Minnesota. By the time our mother died, she was celebrating the Jewish holidays in secret, not wanting to upset our father. In the years after her death, I have developed my own traditions.

When the Starcross wreath arrives, I place it outside next to my front door, where the evergreen fragrance lingers, and the wreath remains amazingly green. I get out a box marked Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Bodhi Day, Winter Solstice and Eid al-Adha. I upwrap the figures of Mary and Joseph that our mother gave to me and place them facing a menorah on my living room table. I didn't have the menorah until two years ago. The menorah remains there until the end of Hanukkah.

On Bodhi Day, December 8, I think about the Buddha and remember the day RTN came home from Vietnam in 1970. This year, December 8 was also Eid al-Adha.

On December 20, 21, 22, or 23, I celebrate the Winter Solstice, a beloved turning point.

On Christmas Eve, I watch the videos of "A Charlie Brown Christmas" as well as "A Child's Christmas in Wales," narrated by Denholm Elliott. Either just after midnight on the beginning of Christmas Day or when I wake up on Christmas morning, depending on my work schedule, I unwrap the baby Jesus figure and place it close to Mary and Joseph.

From December 26 through January 1, I watch one section at a time of the video of "Harambee!," written and directed by Fracaswell Hyman.

On January 1, I celebrate New Year's Day. I love New Year's Day. For many years that was the only day of the holiday season when I felt a sense of celebration.

On Epiphany, January 6, I bring out figures of the Three Wise Men, which I didn't have until three years ago. January 6 is the birthday of my nephew, whom I haven't seen since my father died in March of 2003. I celebrate the life of my nephew!

At the end of January 6, I put everything back in the box until the next December.

Last year, between December 1 and January 6, I also listened to the videos of "Muhammed: Legacy of a Prophet" (PBS), "Faithful to Continuance: Legacy of the Plateau People" (a celebration of art and artists produced and directed by Mimbres Fever), "Ram Dass: Fierce Grace" (a film by Mickey Lemile), and "Pema Chodren & Alice Walker in Conversation on the Meaning of Suffering and the Mystery of Joy" (published by Sounds True, Inc.). For me, the traditions are all alive and evolving together.

Come to think of it, the first tradition, before the opening of the traditions box, is celebrating Thanksgiving in peaceful solitude on the 4th Thursday in November.

For most of my adult life, I dreaded this time of year. I'm grateful to have found a way to see it differently.

There was more snow last night, and it just started snowing again. Oboe is curled up, sleeping. It's cold and quiet outside at this moment, except for the Red-Winged Blackbirds singing from the tops of the cattails.

AN EARLY MORNING MEDITATION ON ANGER AND GRIEF AND FEAR AND GRATITUDE AND LEARNING THAT I DID LOVE MY MOTHER ALL ALONG AND ALWAYS WILL

Thirteen years ago, around 11 o'clock on the morning of December 3, 1994, during Hanukkah and Advent, on the day before my parents' 45th wedding anniversary, my mother died unexpectedly at age 78 of a massive heart attack.

Beginning in 1987, at age 36, when I began my recovery from many years of bulimia and anorexia, I had felt an increasing resentment toward my mother. On the day that my mother died, I woke up feeling an unexpectedly deep and painful anger toward her, which I wrote about at length in my journal that morning. Later in the morning while I was at work, I received a phone call from my youngest sister who told me that our mother had died that morning. I had not experienced before, and have not experienced since, the profound shock I felt in that moment. In my shock, I "saw" a dark heavy cloud, located at the level of my eyes, lifting up and disappearing and revealing clear sky, and I said to my sister, "I don't believe you." Then I said, "She can't hurt me anymore." Then I began to cry. In the following 24 hours, I began to experience the anger and grief that had been building up since I was a tiny child. What was missing was the fear I had always lived with.

One of my earliest memories, at somewhere around 2 years old, is that my mother was angry. I didn't know why she was angry, but I didn't sense that she was angry at me. She was vacuuming the living room in the apartment where we lived. My father was at work. I don't know where my baby sister was. I listened to my mother's angry words and thought, "Anger is stupid. I will NEVER be angry." How a 2 year old could come up with that vow is still a mystery to me, but that was my vow -- a vow I tried to keep, consciously and unconsciously, to the detriment of my physical and mental health, until after my mother died. Now I know that anger is not stupid. It is a challenging and revealing part of being human. I understand now that my mother may well have been experiencing unexpressed grief in the form of expressed anger and rage that blocked her ability to live in peace and love fully.

My mother's first memory was that she was a very young child in a room full of people, that she looked out a window and saw a human body fall from above and said, "Body," and that no one understood what she was trying to say. Soon it was discovered that someone had committed suicide by jumping out a window. After my mother died, my father told me that when my mother was a young woman in her 20s, a young man killed himself after she expressed that she was not interested in a relationship with him.

The last time I saw my mother, in February of the year that she died, she told me that she was tired of being angry. Until she died, I had always had a hard time understanding other people's anger because I had not been able to consciously experience my own anger. After she died, I was shocked to discover the extent of that anger. As a child and until after she died, I don't remember feeling love for my mother. What I often felt in connection her was fear and something else I couldn't identify but now understand was anger and grief.

My mother's mother wasted away and died at home of gallbladder cancer when my mother was 20 years old. My mother told me that she had felt anger toward her mother long before her mother became ill and that she had felt anger towards her mother throughout her mother's illness. When I look at the above photo of my mother and her mother in the year prior to her mother's death, I see the physical and emotional "distance" between them. I suspect that my mother, too, was not able to love her mother until after her mother died. I believe that there was considerable emotional distance between my grandmother and her mother. When I was in my early 30s, always deeply ambivalent about motherhood and never having been pregnant, I made a clear decision not to be a mother and at age 36 underwent a tubal ligation, creating an irrevocable distance between me and the possibility of giving birth to a child.

When my mother was in her late 60s, in the years when she was considering converting to Judaism, she began to study Tai Chi. My favorite photos of my mother are those of her as a child, as a young woman on a horse, and as a 70-year-old woman practicing Tai Chi. On the first photo of her in the series of photos above, her mother had written, "Miss Independence." Maybe "independence" is what I first began to love in my mother after she died, something that made her somewhat distant and confusing as a mother but which now endears her to me, as well as this sonnet she wrote thirty years before she died and in which she expresses both grief and gratitude. It has taken me a long time to learn to begin to understand and love my mother who at age 50, as she began to turn away from organized religion, wrote:

The answers rise and fall like waves. I wait

Then blindly stumble on towards heaven's gate.






















Sometime in the months after my mother died, I was startled to experience a vision of my mother inside heaven's gate, being greeted by her mother whose name was Irene and whose name means "Peace."