December 25, 2024

The associations we make with Christmas,
and Christmas Day,
stir emotions and cast moods
for a life time.

I wonder what my associations would have been like
if my mother had been a Jazz singer
and my father had been a poet.

What would my Christmas memories have been then?
And the emotions?
And the moods?

Idle reflections, these,
playing with reality.

But, reality itself is a reflection of 
projections we create and plant in our memories
to produce "facts" that were more impressions
of events than recollections of events "as they were."

The stories we tell ourselves sculpt a past life
in stone,
but how accurate are those perceptions
that we have tended over time?

My mother was not a Jazz singer
and my father was not a poet,
and I would have been better off
if each of them had been more self-aware
and conscious of the truth of their own life,
of their own original nature,
their own innate virtues
(the things they were capable of doing,
the person they were capable of being),
and their own inherent imagination,
and their own intrinsic intuition.

If they had known and served those things,
how different things would have been 
for all of us!

Carl Jung stated somewhere:
“The development of personality means fidelity to the law of one’s own being.” 

My parents, like the vast majority of all parents ever, 
knew more about who they "ought to be,"
who they were "supposed to be,"
than who they were.
They felt like they were "not good enough,"
and never "just right the way they were."

My parents didn't have a chance
because they had no one to tell them
to listen to themselves,
to trust themselves
to the way their own heart 
told them was the way for them to be.

"Fidelity to the law of their own being"
was not something they were ever told about,
not something they ever considered.

And I have had many people, 
many voices,
telling me those things,
and I have found many models
of people who told themselves 
those things--
and who have become for me
the parents I sadly (for them and for me) never had.

I regret that my parents 
never had what it would have taken
for them to have turned to the 
emptiness, stillness, silence
asking, "What am I doing?
"How can I do it better?"
and sat waiting for the mud to settle
and the water to clear,
and for clarity to show them the way
to the answer to both those questions
over the full course of their life.

And my Christmas wish for all of us
is that we take those two questions
into the silence, etc., with us,
and not leave until we have the answers
we need for the remainder of our life.

Amen! May it be so!