Merry, Merry

All is calm. Outside it's snowing, all is covered in white. The screen is white as I write this blog. I had started writing another version of this blog, had actually completed it, and the website site just glitched out...it disappeared. So I begin again.

Tonight is the night before Christmas Eve. This brings to my mind many previous Christmases. Last year my father was still with us in physical form. This year he is with us in spirit, but my mother still mourns. It is natural. It takes as long as it takes, and maybe some part will never let go completely, as the love stays and the longing to be with them in form remains. Keanu Reeves has spoken insightfully about this in interviews and in his poetry. I would like to read his book of poetry, Shadows, published in 2019.

Christmas has joy. But it is not all joy. It is part of the delving into the ghosts of Christmases past, but not forlorn, rather, in gratitude for those beautiful moments and the ones that taught something necessary. The ghosts of Christmas future comes to tempt us out of this moment, with all its presence presents. So here I am. Reflecting onto this white lit up page to somewhere onto your lit up screen, maybe you'll read this now, or someday. Maybe you'll reply. Maybe you'll write your own blog.

What I know is that this time of year celebrates most of all two things, perhaps three: 1. to remember and rekindle a child-like wonder at everything, ("reborn, remade, like ocean waves....", as my song "Lion's Gate"'s lyrics say). And 2. it's about being reborn unto the light. Like every Christmas carol relates, and just so you know, there is one I just recorded and posted on my YouTube channel: "Silent Night, Noche de paz." But this also entails releasing the shadow from its caged depths. Reintegrating it, as sand back to the beach. Is that the third one? Or is it part and parcel of the second?

Maybe all our snowmen are really sandmen who are waiting to see us, once , beautiful and brave...yes, you may recognize my paraphrasing of Rainer Maria Rilke: Letters to a Young Poet (1903-08); this is one of the books that had the most impact on me when I read it, together with Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926), Jean Paul Sartre's Existentialism, and Gabriel García Márquez' Cien años de soledad (1967). These I read when I was coming out of high school and going into university. Yet, Rilke's poem is one of the first poems I ever committed to memory. I can recite it still. Perhaps I will post a video of my doing so...perhaps it will become a song. :)

“How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us. So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloudshadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.”

― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet