By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
HAPPY Holidays! My gift to you this post is very little political detail. It won’t cheer you, encourage you or make the coming days happier. It would even be productive, perhaps, to fast from news the next few days. I’ll keep an eye on it for you, if you insist on knowing when the sky falls or the Congress implodes or George Bush chokes on another pretzel. Let me be candid, though. I’m struggling with the season. I think many of us are, certainly many who can’t seem to find time, money or energy to do what we managed so smoothly even a year ago. It’s part of our shift and it’s calling for a change in how we handle our experience of the holidays.
Of the many things that need to change if we are to make an evolutionary jump, our traditions are the toughest to let go. We define ourselves through our participation in them. They’re dear to us, they comfort and calm us even if they’ve become anxiety-ridden and shallow, as has our excessive holiday season. Face it, today’s version of Santa might as well have been slapped together by the G20 as the ultimate profit booster, and I could go on indefinitely about the misery Christocrats have produced with their politicized culture wars.
Andrew Sullivan thinks that the reason the Christocrats feel free to demonize Obama as a probable Muslim is because he’s an actual Christian, as opposed to their religious embrace of capitalism in tandem with politically-operative theocracy. They’re not familiar with what they’re seeing, similar to when they tell us about how the Constitution works without having any idea of its actual transcendent quality. Me, I think those trapped in this kind of fervor wouldn’t recognize a real follower of Christian principle if they ran one over with Santa’s reindeer at the mall. Especially at the mall.
Santa and the Baby Jesus have morphed into a single reason for the season these days. Secular or religious, this time of year makes us largely bi-polar, swinging unsteadily up and down the emotional spectrum. Nostalgia for Christmas past and trepidation over Christmas future may fill our Christmas present with anxiety this year, and it’s safe to say that feeling has been growing stronger, year after year, for quite awhile. Our conditioning puts us into spending mode, even as that proves difficult and often unwise. Our emotions beg us to join in for the contact high found in filling shopping bags while our common sense advises caution. When we are unable, as many are these days, to manage any but the smallest reminders of the season, depression often moves to sit like an uninvited guest at our table. The holiday season should not be about class and affluence, but in our culture, ‘more is better’ isn’t a suggestion, it’s a mantra superseded only by ‘shop ’til you drop.’
We live in a universe of plenty, and the thought that there isn’t enough is ludicrous; on the flip side, when IS enough enough? The inequity of our class structure and culture has center stage these days, and it’s time to look at that honestly and unflinchingly. I think we go a little — ok, a lot — nuts at Christmas with giving and getting and having because we’ve lost a sense of magic in our lives. We want to give our kids, and the little kid in ourselves, those glimmers of transcendent experience, so we make sure to provide that dearest wish or greatest desire, yet too often we’ve merely passed along stuff.
Stuff doesn’t make us happy; there are studies. And maybe we spend because we’re subconsciously pushing back at our own deadening nerve-ends, our inability to break through the societal constraints that limit our creativity and freedom. We have to get the money, so we give up giant bits of our life-force to get it; spending it is what there is to do, the slight and shifting power base of the working stiff. Not a good substitute for living authentically, but a carefully constructed charade that needs plenty of maintenance. Time to rethink that. The universe appears to be helping to slow that down to a crawl so we can.
Stuff isn’t evil, nor is our desire for stuff — but what we’ll tolerate and what we’ll compromise to get it surely appear to be at the root of our undoing. Within the acquisition of stuff, itself, is that moment when we realize it’s too much, we’ve gone too far, we’ve hurt ourselves. That’s where the PR folks rush in to soothe and calm us, silence the little whisper with loud voices, clever commercials and encouraging hoorahs. Listen for the softer voice. We must learn to recognize the authentic voice of our better angels, begin to experience the limitations of stuff as opposed to the reward and satisfaction of actual substance. We must break our dependency on the illusions that keep us prisoner.
Our ability to give to one another can certainly involve money, and in most instances must involve some, but that must never be the most of what giving is about. Money, of itself, is not impressive. We have to get over thinking it is. We have to grow beyond thinking we are what we do, hence what we earn. Despite brief periods when it wasn’t so, class distinctions in this country severely limit our upward mobility. If we want to change that back to the days when American sweat-equity and ingenuity could cross class lines, we’ll have to turn back forty years of conservative damage to the rules that made the American Dream possible. We can do it. Need I remind you that within any challenge we have everything we need to master it, Grasshopper?
And listen — despite PR to the contrary, an occasional lotto ticket doesn’t count as a legitimate way into prosperity, but it makes a damned fine stocking stuffer. Easy on the pocketbook too. Me, I’d rather go over to Heifer International and give a chick or a goat in someone’s name, and have for years; if you’re vegan, you can choose bees or trees. How much more life-affirming can you get than to give someone the means to sustain themselves? Warning: if you give this gift to someone who only looks up from the card, owl-eyed and mystified, their head cocked like a dog hearing a high-pitched whistle, you are no longer in the company of liberals. They’re better off with the lotto tickets.
This is largely a make-do Christmas for a majority of us. That may be a good thing, a changeling energy in a shifting paradigm. We ourselves are becoming something other than a 20th century version of American; our holiday traditions must follow in short order, and perhaps that’s the blessing in the manger of this new century. The less we have, the more we look around and actually see one another. Perhaps that’s the gift that’s been missing all along.
May your days be merry and bright, dearhearts. Happy Holiday.
Yeti; (Re: The Personal is Political)
When the “ex” insisted on taking me down I made him one vow – to hold on (to him so he would bind* himself to do unto himself what he would do to his children and me).
In the end, falling through fire, ice and water – well, candidly, the world does not look all so different that it did when I was a kid. However, one of my favorite pastimes even then was to lay upside down and pretend the ceiling was the floor.**
**Me thinks that perhaps now it is.
No need to be angry. Just to plant the garden 🙂
xo
*P.S., yes, I have pulled him out by the roots and burned them, blowing the ashes to the will of the Universe.
Tuning into the season for us in the temperate regions of the northern hemisphere isn’t burning more energy. It’s slowing down and hibernating. The insanity of the dominant culture wants to be constantly growing. The dominant culture behaves like the cancer cells that torture people from within, only it tortures the whole biosphere. The outer imposes itself on the inner, too. The quantum shuffle goes both ways.
Obama still says that the American People™ want to grow the economy. I don’t. Growing the economy always means killing more of the biosphere to transmute into dollars, making more pollution, more garbage, “developing” “natural resources”. Energy efficiency means less money and power are spent to meet the needs and wants of life. A permaculture farm produces more food than an aggroculture one, but it can’t employ as many people because the plants and critters mostly take care of themselves. So then you don’t have to work so hard and there’s more time for life and living, art and culture. It’s a bald faced lie that civilization saved us from boring lives of scraping a living off the land, brutish and short. How about all the wars and objectification that arise out of locking up the food and dividing everything so the Psychopath can conquer it. Sounds like a bad deal to me. Research now shows that human lifespans declined after the aggrocultural revolution. And our hunting and gathering ancestors only worked for their survival maybe 2-5 hours a day as opposed to us working 8+ hours per day or being looked down upon because we’re unemployable for someone else who gives us a small share of the profits in exchange for the energy of our lives while suits who don’t work but own get the lion’s share. We’ve been lied to, peeps. Civilization is bullshit.
Capitalism is dying and it’s trying to take the whole fucking world with it as it goes down. Grow the economy, bigger, better, faster, more! Yeah, let’s expand the cancer colony! Slow down you crazy ape. You’re burning the place down, you’re strangling the waters with your resentment in the form of plastic and petrochemistry.
Living on a food card you don’t have enough energy to play the reindeer games and jump through the hoops of expectation anyway. Sleeping late is energy efficiency cause then you can stay warm by staying under your blankets instead of turning up the heat. This recession isn’t going to end by growing our economy. It might end if Wall Street is destroyed utterly so that there’s no seeds left to poison the earth any more and forever. For now, it’s time to gather strength for future battles when there’s more sun in the sky to give them life. Next spring I’m going to plant enough food I won’t need the card anymore.
I have been, for the most part, deliberately “out of touch” with my family for many years. There was too much crap that had manifested for me in ways that I am not yet detangled from. I needed to decompress, re-evaluate, re-learn and re-create. And along the way, even this past Venus Retro, I decided that I would not repeat old patterns and “try to explain myself to my family”. They are who they are. And I am Me.
But what I am doing differently is taking into consideration each card, letter or message I receive from family this Christmas Season. And remember the person I knew, consider the person they probably “really are” to me – and send a note, letter, card that I hope we will both appreciate.
In the meantime, a verse of a poem I wrote as a child – when my father inquired as to who the hell “do I think I am” (I think I posted this on PW once before, forgive the repeat):
Who Am I?
I’m Me.
Some people are No One
Some people are Someone Else.
But I’m ME,
That’s Who I Am.
As my Greater Gift this Christmas Season I hope to be a reflection of something more Relevant to Positive Human Existence than most of us have been able to be in what is now past.
xo
Well Jude,
You mentioned what this article wouldn’t do, but you didn’t say it would amuse and give one a warm feeling of good cheer, as it does. Thanks so much for your gift of writing and wisdom and understanding of the needs of the soul. All your commenters so far seem to be managing this transition the Universe is providing our planet and it’s inhabitants, as are, I’m sure, your other readers who don’t express themselves so easily. It is a good feeling just to not read about the fractious behavior and comments we endure throughout the year and instead, the encouragment to treat one another with civility and kindness. I hope your holidays will reward you with the same generous and loving thoughts that you have given us today. Merry Christmas!
be
Love your advice to ignore the news for a few days. I’ve been treading lightly in that department for a few weeks now and staying away much more than usual from progressive radio, which seems sometimes to me as reactionary and manipulative as conservative radio, both designed to gin up frustration and anger by focusing on extreme interpretations of current events. My addiction to news started at the beginning of the Iraq war when my son was sent as part of an artillery division. In my terror for him, it was the only way I could find to ‘be with him.’ The first thing in the morning and the last thing at night, I listened to NPR to get a sense of where he might be, what kind of actions he might be involved in, etc. I knew in my heart there was something very wrong with the way his service was being used from the start. I knew there was something wrong with the focus on Iraq, when we were initially told that bin Laden was in Afghanistan. I knew that there was something suspicious in the shifting focus from Afghanistan to Iraq. I knew this entire reaction to 9/11 was wrong. And I think at the deepest level, I knew that 9/11 was something we had done to ourselves, something that our government had allowed to happen or perhaps even caused to happen to us in the service of corporate greed. I think we all know this and this is what explains American denial, fear and anger at its deepest levels.
The Sudan and Darfur had been figuring prominently in the news before 9/11, and I had pictured my son’s service being used for peacekeeping in that area rather than the way it has been used since 9/11. And maybe the US doesn’t do ‘peacekeeping’ ever without some selfish interest. I couldn’t believe that the massive protests across the world against the war had no effect on Bush’s plans. But the wholesale abuse of my son’s service and the service of his fellow service people is abominable and unforgivable. How can I forgive it? I am a member of a group that believes that ‘resentment is the number one offender.’ I have been full of resentment and a disillusionment that has deprived me of my joy and filled me with grief. To cope I have followed the news, called my politicians, worked for political change at the midterms before Obama’s election, worked for Obama’s election, and voted at these latest midterms. I’ve listened to or read testimony from the ‘Winter Soldier’ gatherings from Iraq veterans. I’ve counted my blessings that my son’s path in his service in the army has been easier than many other soldiers and that, while it could change at any moment, his choices have kept him off the ground since the initial invasion of Iraq for which I am very grateful. I know many parents of service people haven’t been so lucky.
I pray everyday for light to shine on the darkest parts of our recent American history. I know on a personal level that shining a light on my darkness has resulted in healing, and I can’t help but think that the ‘macro mirrors the micro’ in needing sunlight in order to heal. Many dark things have been done ‘in my name’ as an American citizen. As an American citizen does it serve me or my country to keep these things in the dark? I don’t think so. Keeping these things in the dark only gives permission for even darker things to be conceptualized and accomplished. Things that really are only leading to one outcome. Humanity’s self-annihilation. I’ve needed to say these things for a long time, and it’s taken me this long to find the courage and the words. Perpetual war, pollution, climate change, greed, etc., will lead to our end. I hope we will find new ways and new beginnings but learning how to die well may be our next lesson. And as a famous bishop once said, “There is always hope in death.”
Bless you Jude… and Thank You for speaking my heart
Jude, thank you. The mad consuming frenzy of the season seems designed to keep everyone from feeling what is really going on in their hearts….. as is the purpose of pretty much all addictive behavior come to think of it…… This Mercury Retrograde has definitely thrown so many roadblocks and obstacles and diversions in my path that I really finally seem to be learning a new approach to daily decisions, and one that comes from a deeper more organic level of being than the ordinary mind of to-do lists.
It’s a rather nice corner to be backed into.
My bio family has known for years I am an oddball and may or may not show up for customary celebration type events, so I don’t have the pressure to perform “appropriately” that many people do, for which I am grateful.
I hope the overload of political/economic/environmental/social justice bad news and shock news will shake everyone loose from their habits of mind and reaction. That would be the most splendid Christmas present ever.
I understand that the coming lunar eclipse on the Solstice is thought by some (maybe accurately) to be creating the darkest day in some nearly 500 years (the last time the two events coincided) Which is actually auspicious. It’s like a big big outbreath, clearing out all the old dead air in the lungs, before bringing in fresh lifeforce in the next inhale.
Wishing everyone here and all your loved ones known and unknown, incarnate and discarnate, human and non-human, a splendid and fulfilling Season of Return of the Light.
Kyla
I have not done the traditional Christmas for many, many years.
I watch people sending cards that just get thrown in the trash, buying “stuff” that no one needs, attending functions they would really rather not attend, and adding tremendously to their stress level.
Imagine if everyone who was able would donate to the local food bank, support the homeless, or Adopt-A-Family in lieu of all the rest. That would really make it “merry”.
It’s true, the part about looking around and seeing each other.