CHRISTMAS IS A SPIRIT THAT LIVES IN MY HEART

The Christmas spirit — love — changes hearts and lives.

                                                                 Pat Boone

Christmas is a Spirit that lives in my heart. This past weekend I ate pie, shared stories, and wrote holiday cards with a dear friend.

We’ve shared this tradition of writing holiday cards over the years. But we also shared it often as three people. Robert was with us then. A year ago Robert passed on to that other shore.

Marie and Robert were married for fifty years. It would have been too abrupt to write holiday cards without first hearing Marie’s Robert poems, Marie’s and Robert’s Warp and Woof poems or Marie’s sojourn into new life.

Marie’s poems emerge from the bone and marrow of her soul. My heart gasps with Robert being invoked again as a living, breathing presence. He is gone...and not gone...as Marie invites in a new relatedness with her world.

Photo By Karla Boyd

At a particular rock and tree formation, Marie shared a special ‘Robert moment’. That was on our first walk. On other walks, we wended around trails and marveled at Sutro baths and Golden Gate Park gardens. On our last day, we delighted in seeing double crested Cormorants, a Brown Pelican; we shared secrets and sighed at the burnt orange sunset as the golden sun dropped into the ocean.

Photo By Karla Boyd

This past weekend, our conversations teetered at the edge of vulnerable intersections, and stumbled into unchartered waters and engaged Process as if a She. It's as if a Presence, a Soft Feminine Presence that lives within us all, called us out from mundane familiarity into embryonic encounters that engage a deeper flow with life. We opened more in its unfamiliarity. We are, to borrow Marie’s words, finding our place

in the flow, the every moving piecing together, coming together,

of things in their own way, in their own time, reassuring,

sustaining and satisfying.

Holiday cards finished, we sit at Marie’s dining room table as the last wisps of sunset become dusk. With the lights not turned on, we encounter a quieting intimacy.

         Photo By Karla Boyd

“Today, I realize how much of your careful arrangement of everything reminds me of my grandmother.” Christmas Spirit has engaged Marie and I all weekend. Christmas Spirit: A LOVING Presence unfolding warming encounters in soft, sparkling radiance.

“I felt Christmas Spirit when I was with my grandparents,” I say near the end of Marie’s and my time together. When I was five, seven and ten, alone or with a friend, spending a week with my grandparents in the summer, Christmas was there.

When alone, I’d sit at the breakfast table with my grandparents. After eating, Goldie would ask, “What do you want to do today?” Christmas Spirit lived in the ordinary way we designed a trip to the local swimming pool; or travels anywhere with my grandfather when my grandmother needed some solitude. It lived in my walking alone to the corner store to buy dinner preparations.

That common conversation of three souls unfolding our day never let us down.

My grandmother’s hearing was impaired when she was three years old. On occasion, my grandparents sat on their front porch rocking. “Karl, what’s that sound,” she’d ask. “Oh, don’t get excited, it’s just the kids climbing out the bedroom window onto the roof, listening to our conversation.” We’d scramble back into the room. I can still hear my grandfather’s laughter.

My grandmother and I would sit in a swing on the side porch, my bare feet bouncing off the wall of the church next door. My grandmother never meddled but was interested in everything I said. We spoke of simple things in the most extraordinary way.

Close to dinner, my grandfather conspiratorially called me into the pantry room. He’d reach into the cupboard and pull out sugary orange slice wedges. “Don’t tell your grandmother, now.”

Christmas is a Spirit that lives in my heart. It’s evoked every time a moment is freed into life’s deep rhythm. It’s an everyday, ordinary time made sacred.

What about you, dear Reader, have you discovered Christmas Spirit living in your heart?