Northern Greetings
Writing to you from the intersection of imagination and reality
Happy Hanukkah, Good Solstice, Gud Yule, Merry Christmas, and warm wishes for all the holidays of this season in the north.
As my expectations of myself gently fade away under the blanket of snow’s blessings, I find a simpler, more restful way. No longer so engaged with intensity, to release an outcome based on the push of force. As our dear Tibetan friend, Geshe Lama Kaldan, often said, “Lord Buddha never pushed.”
You see, I sat down to write to you today, just intending to say happy holidays for this delightful week of celebrations circling around our western traditions at the time of the Winter Solstice here in the north of the great globe. But thoughts, as usual, are taking me for a bit of a run through the fields of memory and imagination.
So I say, let’s go! Feel gravity’s pull from the earth core to the sun’s centre. Full swing!
In my first grade science book there was the circle showing our world, nicely and equally divided into top and bottom by a big important line called the equator. And there was an actual globe on a stand, illustrating this with all the pink Commonwealth countries pointing out that we were part of one family of nations. I was to especially love the pink ones, because they were ours. The North Pole was at play in my imagination as the home of Santa. The South Pole was surrounded by a vast uninhabitable wasteland but somehow had cute penguins, dressed fancy in their little tuxedos.
That static sphere, impressed upon my childhood mind, is now only a sun-faded memory. Yet this basic and limited education, a form of mental drill, improbably, still held magic, for it opened up for me words, numbers, and libraries of tools to understand thoughts from long ago thinkers of the past. I met Plato there or his shadow; I saw the Library of Alexandria first in its miniature form as a Carnagie Library in Calgary, where I vowed to read all the books, in alphabetical order. And I was taught how the years revealed themselves when they circled the sun.
At Solstice, the darkest day, the gnomes and elves came up to the spiral pole at the top of our earth, where they began frantically manufacturing the happy things of dreams for all the children of the world, especially in the pink countries.
Oh, how I loved the great magic team of flying reindeer.
Oh, how I pondered like a koan, the simultaneous impossibility of Santa delivering to ALL the kids at once on ONE sleigh with only ONE big fairytale sack of inexhaustible delights.
In my child-thoughts: over to the side was the baby Jesus, under that brilliant otherworld star that maybe was imaginary. Those three wise men came from exotic far places, with their silks and turbans and incredible fancy-work gift boxes. I knew about gold, but just what was frankincense and myrrh? How did the elves and Santa connect with baby Jesus? Why did we have a tree inside the house, and how about those pictures of trees with real burning candles on them? Was that safe? The angel at the top of the tree, lit from inside her robes, was plugged into all the other string lights. These old lights were fiddly, and if one bulb burned out the whole string went out with it.
So much for all the pink countries on that old globe. So much for the old limited imperial world without resonance for the other peoples in the same globe. That way of thinking is over. And we see that we are not just what was taught to us in the limited land of our infinite childhood, but that despite these cultural guideposts something was able to take us past what we were, into what we were to become, to open those ways and expand them to include the entire world, past-present-future, not just for the little world of the dream places we wished were true, but the real world of Big Dreams, on which these places have their scaffolding.
Like with Midjourney, we can send out prompts from our minds to find the aggregate images that seem real enough to propel us forward. Give some clues. The key is knowing these are just sketchy maps, ideas that will only unfold when we take the physical steps necessary for them to reveal what is inside them.
All along the way, gifts are set out for each of us, year after year, throughout life. Do we earn these gifts? Not exactly, but we can know that they are infinitely given, from an unending ever-replenishing store. Finding them requires that we step forward.
For they are dream-fulfilling tools that will take on their real event-creating power once they are in our hands. It is not a ‘happily ever after’ scenario, but a continual constant renewal based on the expansion and contraction of infinite universal principles, modified and transposed into our level of understanding. So we eat the special food that is prepared only for us, and we sing the song that only we know, and we look with wide eyes at the falling snow, as it becomes a crystal blanket of wishes, of dreams come true, bit by bit. And as one dream comes true, another dream naturally rises up to take its place.
As I think about the gnomes and elves of the North Pole emerging year after year to make for us limited shadow-versions of the dream things we can barely imagine — events and circumstances that unfold in the year to come — I remember that school globe. In the illustration, it was sliced in half to show the inside. I wondered a lot about that molten magma in the centre, since my science book said it could be made of the stuff of the sun and the stars, still hot, not yet cooling.
Maybe the North Pole drills right down there, and pulls up this brilliant hot light. Maybe it becomes a sweet candy-striped lighthouse, projecting blessings full circle on the darkest night. Those elves dance around it like whirling dervishes, while arching above are all the flying reindeer we could ever imagine.
In the day after Solstice, the sun rises just a little earlier, and the elves are hard at work, building surprises for us, a new turn around the great sun. Something to do with time, and entangled unfolding, here in conjuction with the will of universal being.
This morning we are snowed in, and while there’s still power, I’ll be tapping the keys and writing more. I’ll send you an update from gap time between the holidays and New Year.
Thank you so very much for reading and sharing my thoughts. Your support means a lot to me! Some of this issue’s photos come from Unsplash, others are my own.
Please click the heart if you liked this post. And watch this space, I’ll be sharing more good stuff for us in the new year!
Love where your imagination takes you. Wishing you bright lights all around.
Thank you, Carol!