It’s easy to give up. I did, after a year of blogging, simply stopped. Somehow my lack of sleep and the storm outside make me feel isolated from the world. The house is quiet. The cats are curled up next to the heater, burning their fur and noses. Hello!
This is not just another winter. The end of the world came and went. We wondered, rejoiced, and also wept for the dead children in Newtown. The meaning of Christmas, however, is still shopping.
Christmas dinner: everyone has some kind of diet restrictions.
When I was young I didn’t care to go home for the holidays. Now I miss my children but understand that they have to share their time with others. We play musical chairs.
Tying up loose ends. Binding books. The year is all in the poetry.
Image from fotolia.com
Odd thing. As you say, the end came and went. Even the last minute gasp, there was a rumor that the “real date” was the 23rd, well it has come and gone too. I wonder, now that the “big one” has finally come and gone. Will we turn around and face this world as it is? See what kind of mess we’ve made of it and begin the long but ultimately, more engaging, fascinating and creative work, of redressing all the damage? I mean now that we don’t have to worry about doomsday coming, can’t we see the future which stretches on and on for millions of years and “get on with it?”
When I was a child, Christmas seemed genuinely magical to me. I still have a fondness for it–and for magic. Children are told that, if they are “good,” they will receive gifts. But, in the story, the ultimate Christmas “gift”–the revelation of the divine to the earth–was not given to people because they were good. If anything, it was given to people because they were “bad”! (By “the divine” I mean the longed-for, utterly impossible, ego-shattering irreality.) Poetry too is a “gift,” but the poet would be hard-pressed to say “why” he or she has been given it. Someone said–rightly–that a poet is a person who stands out in the storm again and again, hoping to be hit by lightning. What a gift! Jose Arguelles’ end-of-the-world prediction failed to take into account the fact that the world ends every day and then begins again–though Larry Eigner pointed out that “you’ll always go to sleep / more times than you’ll wake.” Larry asked me, “How many more times?” I said, “One.” Larry said, “Yes.” Now, like Jose Arguelles, Larry is sleeping that one-more-time sleep. If he were alive, I would probably see him on Christmas Eve–tonight.