Three days before Christmas and I haven’t done any shopping except for food, and nor do I intend to. This time it’s by choice, not circumstance. We’ve an Audi and a BMW in the driveway and we are not rushing to drive or fly anywhere. We can be right here at home with each other. And we have our health! Yet there is a damp fog clinging to the windows now at 10:00 a.m. that mirrors shadows that are crossing my mind-screen and flit deep in my heart.
No coincidence our morning meditation from Mark Nepo in The Book of Awakening nis about opening the heart. “God breaks the heart again and again till it stays open. Hazrat Inayat Kahn. … (see p. 419). Nepo poetically cites the ways his heart opened breaking him wider, the way a flood carves the banks of a narrow stream the way lightning splits a tree, like hot water melting soap. He then suggests we center ourselves and concentrate on the part of your heart that is breaking open right now, easing the pain by breathing deep through it and … leaving your heart open and looking inside the break. The lesson is says he, in never closing again.
So what is deep inside my somewhat closed heart? I have had virtually no Christmases with my grandchildren, Carter is almost 15 and Annie, 13; nor will I see my son and his new baby girl of three months this holiday. No decorations or special annual food preparations to make. I will make some of my annual almond English toffee; yet this nothingness feels empty. Sad. Devoid of family which I know I do have all around.
However I am deep in relationship with my beyond significant equal of 20+ years! Not lonely at all, as my single sister Joan is at 65. So why am I in this holiday limbo full of sadness? My Piscean energies pick up others. And not-fun is not my style. Make it go away! I repeat Sheryl Crow’s intonation on that.
So I journal this short void: sadness and anger around the huge shadow around Larry’s adult kids still mired in addiction. I push away wanting to look up Annie’s mom on Facebook, let go of Carter likely hardly remembering he has a biological grandmother in California, and wondering what he looks like as adolescent hormones kick in.
All there is, is now! Get off this Pity Pot, Pat!
Let’s lighten up the few tasks I have today with a little and rock n’roll from KPIG … get a package or two in the mail, decorate in some small way and read Jack Grapes book about Sad Angels, trying not to become one.
Sigh.