Posts Tagged ‘holidays’

I have a few precious moments of serenity as the boys have run down to the neighborhood park for a football game, and my sweet husband has retired to the haven of our bed for a much needed nap.  It is Christmas, again, and we were up late last night wrapping presents and making magic for our loved ones.  I am tired, too, but got more sleep than Peter, and truly, I have to enjoy these quiet moments when they are given to me.

 I enjoy Christmas for some of the feelings it brings…The decorating of the house for the pure purpose of enjoyment and sparkle and light…….The anticipation of seeing my children’s faces when they wake up Christmas morning….the fun of making gift baskets, imagining the healing I put into the cookies settling into the tummies of those that enjoy them… and the hunt for gifts I actually buy, looking for the perfect thing.  I like the feeling that comes when people smile at me and say “merry Christmas”, and I smile back and wish them a happy Christmas, too.  There is a feeling of something larger connecting us all, a feeling of something brotherly or sisterly, of goodwill.  It is the feeling of love that I am riding this time of year. 

I have the not so nice feelings, too….the trance state that I feel attempting to overtake me Christmas Eve like a dark undertow, a tide threatening to take me out to sea where I lose all sense of bearing and the way back to shore.  The not so nice memories of the drunken holiday wildness I experienced as a child, when there was no adult who was totally safe and responsible.  The feeling on Christmas that there is something I am supposed to be doing, something I am supposed to be, and yet I am not, so there is a vague sense of missing the mark.  Worrying about the people who do not have a family or loved one to be with on this day when the expectations can be so crushing to our fragile hearts.  And the grim dissatisfaction I get when I am reminded of the “reason for the season”, a story about a Divine Child, a story that has been bastardized and manipulated in order to wield power over the minds of those weaker than me.

Cynical, oh yes, absolutely.  You see, I was having direct experiences of God when I was 2 and 3 years old, and so when I was sent to a Christian preschool at age 4 and my teacher preached hellfire and brimstone and judgment, painting a picture of God as a mean and nasty all-seeing fellow in the sky, I was in a serious quandary.  “What she is saying does not match my experience.  Do I believe the adult who is supposed to be taking care of me, and upon whose sense of responsibility my safety depends, or do I stick to my inner experience of the All That Is as an unconditionally loving force that has nothing but good to offer to me?”  I chose to believe myself and my own experience, but to be somewhat quiet about it.

I would have liked to know Jesus.  My belief about him was that he was an enlightened man, much like the Buddha.  I believe when he said to love your brother he meant to love everyone, no matter what their beliefs were, no matter what religion they ascribed to, what sexual orientation they had, how they behaved in the world.  I believe he got it that one does not have to be “worthy” to receive the unconditional love that this universe provides.  That whole worthiness thing is something I think humans made up.  How can we be “worthy of unconditional love”, it’s unconditional!   I believe Jesus really understood at a visceral level that we are all One, just like my indigenous ancestors also knew in their walking life.  With every breath, we are affecting the One, with every thought and every action, we are pulling the strings of the web, and all will be touched in some way by what we choose.  I think I would have liked Jesus very much.

So when I hear the Christian ethic that feels so far removed from what I feel to be true about the man called Jesus, and I feel judged because I do not ascribe to those beliefs, it is hard for me to reconcile the anger I feel within towards those people that made Christianity what it is today, and my deep and earnest longing to feel my connection with ALL people, with ALL parts of creation because I feel my Oneness with All That Is.  Sometimes I will be quiet, turn my eyes away and smile, and other times I will change the subject, all because I am a good Indian and too polite to argue.  But then I get to discourse uninterrupted when I write about my feelings.  It’s tough for a southern girl who wants to be a good, loyal Daughter of the Divine to find her own way to Jesus, through all the obstacles placed before me since I was little…the judgment and rhetoric invented by people, not by Love.  But find my way to him I will….like everything else in my life, I will define and cultivate my own relationship with Jesus in the way that feels right to me. 

I honor the Solstice because it is a celestial event, not manmade like Christmas is.  It is well documented that Santa was a commercial invention, so I need not discuss it here.  Even the birth of Jesus has been determined to be in the spring rather than December 25^th, another convenient feathering into a pagan holiday in order to bring more pagans to the fold when Christianity was young and needing to convert followers.  For me, Solstice is the “reason for the season”, in that it is a turning of the season and a shift in our orbit, changing our relationship to the light of the sun, a symbol itself of Life. Yes, we do some of the Christmas rituals, and I think that it is largely in part due to the collective trance that I was raised in and now choose to continue to participate in to some degree.  But Solstice is the Holy Night for me, and the beginning of this truly magical season of remembering my connection to others, and showing them that I love them with generosity and open arms. 

I do take Christmas to be an opportunity to remember the Divine Child Within, and spend some time honoring that innocent, sparkling, all knowing One that resides within each of us.  This is a beautiful way to connect with the story of Jesus, at any time of year. 

I am continuing to define what this time of year is for me…to choose more and more consciously each year what I will participate in, what I will pass on to my children, how I will assist to create an unconditionally loving world.  Perhaps there will come a time that I do no “Christmas” at all, but only Solstice.   I don’t know.  All of these intellectual constructs and words aside, the guiding star for me is how I feel….what feels in integrity, and what feels like being out to lunch, a mere moving through the trance?  What I LOVE about this time of year is the feeling of magic and connection and internal-ness that comes with the onset of winter.  I treasure this turn of the wheel of life, and honor its coming, just as I will honor its going.  Perhaps if I focus on those feelings, my walk in the world will get clearer more light-filled at this time of year.

Licia Biker Santa, by Terri 2009

I wrote this back in 2006, when I was fiercely examining how to reclaim the holidays as my own delightful invention, rather than something belonging to someone else that I was trying on. 

Many of us seem to blindly follow the crowd, as if in some sort of trance, when it comes to holiday time.  I certainly did this for many years!  But the anxiety and disgust that I started to feel about the holidays clued me in that something wasn’t quite right in my relationship with what could be a truly joyous time of year. 

You see, in order to see the culture, we must step outside of it.  Whatever it is that we are enmeshed with, it is very difficult to get clarity about the relative health of the situation unless we remove ourselves from it.  The extrication can be messy, especially when we are dealing with families and the high expectation of holiday time. 

It’s not an easy road to walk to look with a critical eye at the unconsciousness that can abound this time of year.  But I feel it’s better to deal with the discomfort that comes with the truth than to live with a lie. 

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Here we are again!  It’s the holiday time, and it never seems to fail to come back every year.  In my healing work, I think of things coming back over and over to prompt me to look at something about myself that needs some love and perhaps a change for the better.  I wonder if the holiday season might be a ripe opportunity for this kind of self reflection?

I think of the holidays as a time when we lose our center so easily!  It’s when the family trance comes over us like a mist, and we move about like robots following our marching orders.  Where are those orders coming from?  We are indoctrinated early to associate the holidays with over-consumption of all kinds.  We buy in to the idea that we must get together with families and that we must all have a wonderful time together.  We keep expecting the magic and mystery of the holidays to fill our hearts, but more and more of us are barely surviving until after the New Year, when we thank our lucky stars that we made it through one more holiday season.  ENOUGH!

I have come to see the madness that begins at Halloween and lasts through January 2^nd (here in the U.S.) as an embarkation on a crazy, out-of-control bus.  If you ever saw Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, you might remember the wild bus ride that Harry endures when he is whisked away from his ordinary muggle-life to another year at Hogwarts.  As Harry alights on the bus, the driver steps on the gas and the bus careens at insane speeds through traffic, almost running pedestrians over.  The ancient, decrepit bus driver is guided by a shrunken head who advises in a creepy, sarcastic tone when to brake, when to lift the skirts of the bus over other traffic, and when to make the bus pancake-thin in order to get through various obstacles.  Harry seems to doubt whether he will survive this bus ride; it is so crazy, so out of control, so frightening.  It is INSANE.  Perhaps the holidays don’t always make us wonder if we are going to remain bodily intact, but I know that many wonder if they will survive the crazy ride emotionally intact!   

It is interesting to me how I have moved through different cycles during my years of celebrating the holidays.  Certainly, as a child, I was delighted and mystified and just loved the essence of the holiday time, but I picked up on the adults’ stress and discontent, too.  They talked a good talk about the reason for the season being about giving and thankfulness and love, but that did not match with the alcohol, the family fights, the tears and stress around holiday time.  I dove into my presents and played with my cousins and tried my best to ignore them.  I hung on blindly to the idea of santa claus, a sweet, generous man who expected nothing in return.  I was devastated when my mother broke it to me that he did not exist (at age eleven!)  The mystery was gone.

Then it became about getting stuff….as an adolescent, I wanted but could not have the fancy things my fellow high schoolers had.  As a young adult putting myself through college, I do not remember a single Christmas (was I in a fog or did I just not celebrate?)  When I met my husband, I was adopted into his family and became part of the mega-family-holiday machine.  They had traditions that had been in place for generations in their southern aristocratic lineage.  I did not feel the permission to question or reject their traditions, so played along for awhile as a I thought a dutiful daughter-in-law should. It was overwhelming and exceedingly uncomfortable for me.   

When my husband and I had our own children, at first we tried to continue to attend holiday gatherings with the extended (and I do mean extended….like 50-plus people) family, but then there was the hardship of trying to honor my own family of origin.  Whose turn is it this year?  Let’s see, Christmas with mine, Thanksgiving with his…no, that’s how we did it last year.  I started to feel like the sausage two dogs were fighting over!  Then I got bitten by the Martha Stewart bug and wanted to create the most magical holiday season possible for my family-the only problem was I did not have a staff of 300 to help me out!  I got over that one pretty quick. 

And then there was this little voice inside me that said it was time to create our own traditions, in our own nuclear family, on our own terms.  I wanted to choose consciously where to put my energy for the holidays.  It was a huge shock to Peter’s family (not so huge for mine as I had already set some firm boundaries with them) for us to elect not to participate in the machine.  Peter’s parents expressed their unhappiness, and I am certain we were called some unattractive names by some in his family of origin, but we held our ground.  Now, some years later, it is expected by all that we will be having our Christmas at home with our own little family of four (and our cat!)  They are allowed to feel how they want to feel, and that is okay; I cannot control their choice to take it personally when we stay home.  But I do not feel responsible for their happiness any more.  They are free to choose what they want to do with their time just as we are.  AH….freedom!

It has been quite an exploration over the years to look at where I am trying to make others happy, trying to meet some unspoken obligations, trying to exceed expectation.  Identifying what resonates with my heart, instead of blindly clinging to traditions just because others do.  And now, our own family is expanding our idea of what the holidays mean to us.  We feel into our hearts as to what is best for us.  Yes, we consciously choose to incorporate some “traditional” rites during the holidays, but because they resonate with us.  And we incorporate some other things that are not traditional, again because that is what resonates with our family.  For example, we choose to celebrate the Winter Solstice as the beginning of our Yule celebration; we have a giant party with bonfire and wonderful food, and several craft stations set up to make snow flakes, paper-bead jewelry, cinnamon ornaments, and other fun things.  Then we have a ceremony to acknowledge the year that has passed, giving thanks for the bounty and the successes.  We write on colorful pieces of paper those aspects of ourselves that we feel we can lovingly release and transform, and then we throw them into the fire, blessings them as they burn.  We dance, we sing, and we celebrate being alive.  It is a wonderful night of kinship and love.

I am realizing it is always up to us, that we can choose consciously to enjoy what we already do for the holidays by being fully present and with a loving heart, or we can choose consciously to re-form what we do to reflect what makes us happy.  I don’t see much sense in a lot of running around and stressing out and settling for interactions that make me feel unhappy or even crazy!  Life is too short!   

Blessings to you and yours for this holiday season and always!

Greetings Everyone,

It has been three weeks since my last confession….I mean BLOG entry….and I can’t believe it has been so long since I posted anything!  it certainly isn’t because there has been a shortage of happenings with us Berries in the Berry Patch!

We left Monterey after Thanksgiving and camped back in San Luis Obispo, which we have decided is our new homeplace.  We just love it in SLO…the energy there is a GREAT match for us and where we want to go in our lives.  We are so very grateful to have found our new location, and so easily and quickly!  Now we have the task of manifesting actually living here!

We considered traveling around some more, but none of us want to, so we are stationed in SLO for the forseeable future.  We are looking for a long-ish term solution to camp in the RV, perhaps a spot of private land someone would rent to us where we can plug in and live until we sell the Colorado properties and/or manifest other miracles!  If you know of a possible solution or have a creative idea, please be in touch!

Today we are celebrating Solstice (Winter in this hemisphere).  We find the Solstice to be much more where our hearts resonate during the whole holiday hoopla.  For me, it is because the Solstice is not a man-made event chosen on some arbitrary day, but a celestial one, one that is way beyond our control as human beings to mis-interpret or twist to our agenda.  It is very simple….it is the end of the long dark and the coming of the light.  Good reason to celebrate in my view!       

I have felt since the election that we have all been very tired….bone tired, in fact, as though lots of us have been in labor pains for many, many years, and that we finally succeeded in birthing this new era, symbolized by the election of Obama.  I am weary from the effort, me thinks!  But this is just the beginning…this baby is brand new and it will take a firm, wise and compassionate hand to raise it!

It feels so perfect to me that the Winter Solstice is following so closely after the election….I think of Solstice as a wonderful time to reflect on what I have learned in the last year, and to thank the Whole of Creation for all that it has brought to me…..and then to dream about the new cycle that is coming, the fresh year ahead.  What do I desire?  What are the next steps in my growth and understanding?  How can I be the best Divine Human that I can be and be of service to the Whole?   What is so very dear to my heart?  These are all wonderful things to reflect on this day.

And tomorrow, we will have our version of the gift giving that occurs in other holidays…the day after Solstice feels like a day of abundance and celebration to me, an ushering in of the new energy that we are choosing to align ourselves with.

May you have a peaceful and fulfilling Solstice, and blessings to you and yours!

xoxoxo

Licia and da Berry Boys