I wasn’t going to get up for it, but I’m glad I did. At around 3 a.m. I put on clogs and coat and walked into the backyard. Suzanne and Tom were already up, their heads tilted back, binoculars in hand. Copper was running circles in the snow. And up in the sky, the pale moon wore a red veil, a smudge of unearthly color against the white.
It was the lunar eclipse — on the same day as the winter solstice. The last time these two events overlapped was 1638. It made for a cold, eerie, magical night. I half expected to see a sleigh and reindeer in the sky. I’ll have to wait a few days for those, I guess.
Every year for the past half dozen we’ve driven west into the rolling hills of Loudoun County to cut down our Christmas tree. It started as a lark and has become a tradition, one we uphold even when cries of “it’s too far” or “I have homework” almost rule it out.
Yesterday we took two dear friends, so there were seven of us in the car, and it was an occasion. It didn’t take long to find the Douglas fir of our dreams, hack away at the trunk and topple the tree. We drug it down the mountainside, paid for it and lashed it to the top of the car.
This morning I learned that the Snickers Gap Christmas Tree Farm is closed for the season. We just made it.
As the year ends I feel a need to tie up loose ends, finalize projects, complete research. Often I have no choice. I have a freelance article due. This year I’m off the hook. But I still feel pressure.
After a while, meeting deadlines becomes a habit and the urge to complete tasks is there whether the tasks are or not. It’s part of what makes me get up every morning. It’s a switch permanently stuck in the “on” position. I push myself before the holidays because they present a chunk of time during which nothing must be done. It’s the open window framing an expansive view — the pause I’ve been waiting for all year long. I’m not there yet, but I’m getting close.
On the subject of holiday cheer: It is hard to summon sometimes. This year we are missing Tom’s Aunt Mary Ann and dealing with other sadness. Our tree isn’t up yet because we’re waiting for the girls to come home from college. Bad weather and postponed finals may delay their arrival. It’s easy to find the shopping, cards, baking and wrapping more demanding than other chores because they require false gaiety. How to lighten the heavy heart?
Here is today’s plan: I exercised early; it helps clears the cobwebs. I scoured the counter and threw out three days worth of old newspapers. I’ll work; intellectual effort takes me out of myself. I’ll make our favorite cookies today, the ones that melt in your mouth. I’ll pray; that goes without saying. Most of all I will be grateful for all we have, which is much, so much.
It is office party season. We had one yesterday and will have a smaller one, with just my immediate colleagues, today. The office party, like the meeting, is something I didn’t have for many years, the years I was freelancing full time. It’s at parties and meetings that I most have to shake my head and pinch myself. After more than six years it still seems slightly unreal to be working with people again.
Today I write to celebrate this occupation. Not that it doesn’t have its moments, but there are days when I am immeasurably grateful to walk out the door, to leave behind the house and clutter, to go out into the world.
The ghostly white on suburban streets is the residue of salt from a snow storm that wasn’t, a phantom blizzard. Rock salt crunches underfoot as I walk. The wind blows into my face, makes my eyes tear and my nose run. Other than that, all is frozen hard.
It’s a bleak landscape, unadorned by snow, wind-gouged and silent. Just being outside is an accomplishment, and walking through the cold reminds me that we have to keep going or freeze. Extreme temperatures are a great motivator. Besides, in my ears is a most unusual version of “The Four Seasons” by Vivaldi, full of strumming and thumping and trills. I could hear the birds singing, the streams gurgling. I listened, I lowered my head, I walked as fast as I could till I got home.
As we rush toward the solstice, as fall gives way to winter, consider for a moment the nearly bare tree. Dark trunk, tangle of limbs and — like so many prayer flags flying — the last autumn leaves, slender salutes to a fading season.
After months of having more leaves than we can count (or rake), the scene is as much about the absence as the presence, as much about the silence as the music. It is as if these last few leaves, so sparse, so perfect, so wan and lonely, are saying, here we are — look longingly on us world. You will not see us again for many months.
They are the last curtain call, the single painting on an expansive wall.
The path to serenity lies in living in the moment. But the moment is hard to find when Christmas shopping. So this year, I’m trying to shop mindfully, to enjoy the process a little more, to choose special gifts for the people I love but not obsess about finding the perfect item.
It’s an attitude shift. It’s about serendipity, stumbling across a scarf with texture and dash or a cunning little teapot. But it requires stores with odd jumbles of merchandise (which I’ve found by steering clear of the mall) and that the shopper (me) browse with open eyes and calm spirit.
Here’s where mindfulness comes in. I’ve noticed that it’s only when I leave behind any notion of finding the perfect gift that all the perfectly good gifts appear.
It is time for the annual Christmas lights show across America, when we put candles in windows, outline our houses, spotlight our doors — and in general thumb our noses at the darkness.
There are specific houses and entire streets I look forward to every year. One dripping in white icicle bulbs that looks like a winter wonderland, another crowded with mismatched Santas, Rudolfs and snowmen.
We have always decorated with colored lights rather than white, with no particular agenda in mind, just a choice. But I remembered as I began to write this post that the late Michael Kelly had written a column about white lights vs. colored lights, and so I found it online and read it.
White lights, Kelly said, “make the statement that one is a refined sort who appreciates that less is more,” and colored lights say that Christmas isn’t Christmas “without an electric sled and reindeer on the lawn, an electric Santa on the roof, an electric Frosty by the front gate and an electric Very Special Person in a manger on the porch” (that last phrase refers to the pageant at his Unitarian church).
While we have no inflatable Santas on our lawn, we are most definitely colored-lights people, a little mismatched and scruffy, never the first to put up our display and often the last to take it down. White lights would be false advertising.
In these final days of 2010, I find myself meditating on time itself. Time-keeping began in the monastery, writes Lewis Mumford. There, inside the walls of the cloister, was regularity and discipline and order — the Rule of St. Benedict, with its strict adherence to seven devotions during the day.
Regularity requires time-keeping, and by 1370 there was a well-designed modern clock. And so, says Mumford, “one is not straining the facts when one suggests that the monasteries — at one time there were forty thousand under the Benedictine rule — helped to give human enterprise the regular collective beat and rhythm of the machine; for the clock is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours, but of synchronizing the actions of men.”
As bells tolled the hours not just in monasteries but in towns and villages, time-keeping jumped the fence of the cloister and moved out into the world at large. “Time-keeping passed into time-serving and time-accounting and time-rationing,” Mumford writes. “As this took place, Eternity ceased gradually to serve as the measure and focus of human actions.”
So as I dash from home to the office, as I parcel the hours of my day into discrete intervals — often wishing for nothing more than time without time — I am heir to this big invention, this new way of organizing daily life. Somehow, that makes the rushing around feel a bit more noble.
