Christmas tides

On this morning before Christmas, I'm on my balcony looking out across the Gulf of Mexico. Staring at the blue horizon, squinting and thinking.  Thinking how the cadence of our lives seems to move like the ebb and flow of this majestic turquoise tide.

And about poppies.

Watching whirlwinds of sand on the beach, they look like mini-tornadoes trying to escape the grasp of the bleached white shore, which is clogged with New York tourists and annoying seagulls.

The towers of determined sand spin and twist, longing to escape back into the silence and infinity of the blue green waters. Among the unseen and the magical.

Shallow and glittering and peaceful, the Tiffany waters move enticingly closer - then dance away as the moon and heavens chase each other across the skies.

Away from the beach, the city is alive with people preparing for the holidays. Like marching ants and swarming bees, it is a pheromonic-like procession.  A directed, animated process of observations - learned in dining rooms, Sunday schools and churches. Reinforced in social engineering and in religious education and doctrine. Confirmed as conveyances of happiness and, sadly, meaning.

No one would argue that traditions don't provide a sense of greater belonging and purpose - regardless of one's social, economic, racial, or intellectual status. They help transcend our production-line of existence and cement our collective and individual religious values. They're important to goodness and community.

But aren't they really just an anesthetic? A numbing to the realization that perhaps we're just another grain of sand on the beach?

For if our souls do truly have a purpose - and I believe they do - a meaningful existence transcends these merely mechanical observances. Of course, religious constructs are important elements of how we interact with our God.

But we can't ignore our soul's real purpose. How can we escape the billions of other grains of sand that make up this beach if we don't create a whirlwind? How can we fling ourselves into the turquoise waters?

I believe the Dali Lama has a soul that is connected to other higher souls over the infinity of time and the universe. People all over the world, whether they are Buddhist or not - also believe. Someday, perhaps quantum theory will begin to explain it - if it's comprehensible at all while in this existence.

The purpose of the soul is not love. It is not about being an expert at following tradition or being a good keeper of religious conformity. Grains of sand know, maddeningly, how to fit nicely next to each other.

It is about seeking justice. The meaningful work of the soul is to make a difference in achieving justice.  Seeking justice for equality and freedom and human rights. Justice that each soul that arrives in this time and space has an opportunity to make a difference. That our souls aren't sold into a slaver's chains in Charleston or slaughtered in a French field. That entire generations aren't eliminated in Polish and German camps. That babies can't be poisoned by toxic chemicals.

Souls like Abraham Lincoln and Nelson Mandela and Maya Angelou.

And Martin Luther King, who once wrote, "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." 

And from army surgeon John McRae. During the warm days of May in 1915, in France, he was near the Ypres-Yser canal. As he watched a fellow soldier die, he composed a poem, heartfelt and poignant, about wasted lives and its profound sadness. Its simple lines are as compelling as the most righteous defenders of justice our world has known:





















Today, in the moat at the Tower of London, individual poppies commemorate the nearly 900,000 British and Commonwealth servicemen who died in that war, one of history’s bloodiest conflicts. It is visited by many millions of people each year.  John McRae's simple but powerful words echo across space and time. A poetic treatise that suffering so many souls is a greater loss than any land, any conflict.

Poppies of justice. Like grains of sand on the beach, swirling and coalescing into something forceful.

It is this noble effort of the soul that Robert F. Kennedy described when he wrote:

“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” 

And so this morning, looking out across the water, I'm thinking about poppies and poems and justice. And why Christmas is really, in many ways, about the birth of Justice.

A Felt Longing

Today, as Katie and Maria gather to bake Christmas cookies, I know they'll be thinking about Cathy. I know I am.  It is a sad longing but also a reminder that her essence still fills our lives.

This was a story I wrote last year - and I can't say it better. It's still true.

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I think this rickety old house knows it will soon be sold, along with its quirks and antiques, its funny smells and its memories.

Today, Kellie visited the house for a final tour. As she walked past the dining room mirror, I could almost see Cathy on her arm, in bell-bottoms and a sweater. Just the way this place remembers her. And the way I do.

To Cathy, who left us last winter, Kellie was one of the inseparable few.  Like Sally and Bobbie, they seemed to be souls connected in early childhood - and maybe long before that.

And now, too often, the vacuum of Cathy's absence seems like an empty ocean that needs filling.

On a bitter and cold January night, I told Sally that we'd miss how Cathy helped each of us feel important. That who we are, what we've done and whatever we'd experienced in that moment in time was special.  She made our lives feel special because she believed in our goodness.

Sally stared at me.  "Now what?" And with that, she disappeared through the front door and into the night - without a coat. Just covered with sadness.

Now what indeed?

"I remember our first day in this house, before you moved in," Kellie said as we walked through the dining room.  "Cathy and I counted all the knobs in the kitchen because we'd never seen so many before.  There were 57."  Just like Cathy to see wonder in every little thing, like the number of kitchen knobs.

I offered Kellie a laminated copy of Cathy's secret cookie recipe, which Meg found in the back of a cookbook in the kitchen.  She smiled, "She never wanted me to have this whole recipe; she'd just give me parts of it and leave me wondering why my cookies were never as good as hers," she said, laughing, "I won't take it now, but I will take a picture of it." Just like Kellie to keep the joke rolling between heaven and earth.

As we passed through rooms and closets and different parts of the house, she'd recall what the two of them did there.  "Your mother asked us to make chocolate chip cookies so often in this kitchen that we used to time how fast we could finish a batch. I think our fastest time was eight and a half minutes."

She told us how they felt when they first saw the house, with dried fall leaves and dust covering the parquet floors. I'm sure we both thought of the transformation that would happen as we filled those same rooms with Simon and Garfunkel music, high school parties, and holidays.

Like Christmas.  When Cathy would decorate it with pieces of herself.

Every Christmas, from bolts of felt, Cathy would create Christmas stockings for each of us. With scissors and glue, she'd decorate each of them with illustrations.  They were her portraits of us - painting, cooking, our dolls, our music, our sports - us.  Reminders of how she felt we were special. And we were.  Together, we were.

Of course her green parrot, Charlie, was always on her stocking. Charlie, now an adopted member of Sally's family - spoiled and glorious and indestructible.

Last night, I received a text from my son Andrew. He was telling me how much he loved that Katie, his sister, was again making felt stockings for our family. About asking him for ideas for her boyfriend's family. He said, "For a moment I was sad because it reminded me of how much I missed Cathy. But then I thought how cool it was that Cathy lived on through Katie."

Cathy lives on in so many different ways. In felt stockings, in turquoise Christmas ornament parties that her inseparable soul-mates host in her honor, in stories and smiles, and in much much more.

Even in Sally's new adopted parrot.

But mostly she lives on in us - as we find ways to remember that we are special and that our lives are wonderful - which we thought would be unimaginable without her.

Now, her lingering sweetness - and goodness - is part of us, all around us.

Now what?  I think we found the answer.