Rollicking boisterously toward Christmas Day at break-neck speed, we need to coax the brakes on this Polar Express before it goes entirely off the rails. The best way to do that is through some simple meditation, for as long as one wishes, and taken every day to form a single thread of consistency when everything else is a jumble of holiday excrement/excitement.
So much of Christmas is loud and brash and overbearing – it’s colorful in that way, a cause for joy and celebration, with its underlying current of goodness and hope and the birth of a baby who will, legend has it, save the world. We want to believe in all of it – in the best of people, in the spirit of the season, and in the goodness that comes out but once a year.
Those are quite a lot of expectations, and partly why I have always found the season confoundingly filled with pressure and difficulty. We’re all supposed to be happy and succumb to the Christmas spirit, even when it’s at odds with the reality of the world around us. Even when we know what the real meaning of the season is, even when the spiritual lessons of the Christmas story are made as manifest as they will ever be, I still don’t think we can fully get beyond the buoying bombast that goes along with it.
When that happens, and I feel myself getting lost to the hubbub and hoopla, I withdraw a bit, going back to the winter nights of my childhood when winter magic felt real, and the scent of pine trees in the woods behind my childhood home was on the wind.
These days, that sort of belief is hard to find, but at this time of the year we may come closest to discovering it again. In the light of a candle, I envision those walks in the woods before or during a meditation. It lends life something grounding when everything else is hellbent on getting a rise out of me.
