Holy Days

I like Christmas Eve best of the holidays because it tends to be the quietest time of the season. It is gray here today and typically, I don’t love gray days. Florida spoils everyone with its almost constant sunshine and so usually, I almost feel affronted when an occasional gray day appears, but today, I truly feel grateful for it. It is the closest thing that we’ll get to a snowy Christmas Eve. It is a quiet gray morning and it feels just right.

I read today that “holidays” really means “holy days.” We are currently experiencing a really spiritual time of the year. No matter what you celebrate or don’t celebrate, what religious/spiritual practices you do, or you do not partake in, there is a “holiness” about an ending of another year of our lives. Holiness means sacred. It means spiritually perfect and pure. There is a deep holiness to this time of slowing down and reflection and insight and reminders of all of the awe that comes from being alive. I read a quote this morning from the songwriter/poet, 77-year-old Patti Smith, that said something like, despite every negative thing that brings her down, going on around us, in the world and even in her own personal life, she still loves to be alive. She still loves to create. She still loves to do her work. If we are honest with ourselves, almost all of us, deeply cling to life. Maybe despite all of our grumblings, the truth is, most of us love to live.

I get really quiet at this time of year. I tend to go deeply inward. Sometimes this feels awkward and scary and I know that it puzzles those who are closest to me, and who also intimately know my wild, wacky, free-and-easy, cheerful loud sides. For me, these “holy days” are a time of absorption and sorting and processing everything (and all of the feels that come with that “everything”) which I have experienced in another whole year of my life. It is a time of deciding what I really need to part from, with all of the more accumulation of everything that occurred over another year of my life, and also what I need to hold on to, and to keep, as sacred. It is a personal system that requires stillness and awareness and vulnerability, and that is why I like the quietness of Christmas Eve.

I am wishing all of you the most lovely things in which these “holy days” have to offer. I am wishing for all of us the ability to surrender to what gifts this unique season has to offer to each of us – the kinds of unexpected gifts that may take quite some time to unwrap, and to ponder, and to assimilate into the new year. Happy Holy Days. May blessings abound.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.