The Other Side of Christmas

How cool is this Aussie nativity scene, put together by my blog bud Kel and her hubby Mr X, from leftovers from their house-building site? Cool, huh :)

Kel has written here about some of the things that encompass an Aussie Christmas. I must say, I would like to be more active and out water-skiing to work off the extra kilos that are going to pile on after I've pigged out totally on turkey and pavlova, but that isn't gonna happen, I'm afraid (never could get the hang of that bloody water-skiing thing, dammit, on the one day I tried). Still, might think about dusting off the old bike, which still sits in the garage. I have had a physically busy weekend, doing heaps of housework to get it in shape for my inspection by my landlord yesterday. It feels so nice to go into my holidays with a clean house. It's funny, but after all those years of having CFS, and having to stop the intuitive urge to push myself when I was tired, now it's the opposite. Now I have to push myself when I'm feeling lazy, because physically, I am so much healthier and stronger than I was. It's just that now, what was once counterintuitive has become intuitive and I need to unlearn the lessons it was so hard for me to learn in the first place.

Opposites. I have felt disconnected at times reading all of these wonderful darkness-themed advent posts some of the talented people on my blogroll have been posting lately. I love what they have been sharing, but I can't really relate to it at the moment. Summer is just opening her eyes here. The summer solstice has just passed. I would LOVE for Christmas to be in Winter. (Actually, I think I would prefer Spring. Spring makes more sense, instead of shoving it on the solstice. I would like to remove the solstice from all the Christmas trappings it's been wrapped in over the centuries. How paranoid was the Church back in those days about people celebrating things like the solstice? Goodness me. Can't have anything like that. That ... well, it looks like nature worship! Looks Pagan! If we allow such things, the populace will go nuts and worship the earth, and break loose and rip their clothes off and have wild maniacal orgies. Whatever. Silly Church :)

But I digress :)

Yesterday was hot. I drove out to do a spot of shopping for my second cousins. (I keep going to call them my nephews, even after all this time, because Andrea is much more like a sister than she is a cousin). I drove with the window down, and the dry air coming in the window. I'd just left my house, which swelters under a flat roof with no space for pink batt insulation. It's a bit of a brain switch, turning on to hot weather. But I love it once I do. The bare feet. The bare shoulders. I can understand why so many people hate the hot weather, but it just does something to my body, you know? It smells like freedom to me. Bring it on, baby :)

I think I shall save all of those wonderful advent posts and reread them again when June and July hit and I am suffering under not enough light. Then I will really be able to appreciate them :)

Rainy Advent

Living on the driest continent on earth, when water falls out of the sky people talk about it. We ring each other up and preface our conversation with, "How about the rain, huh?" At work yesterday people were looking at the Bureau of Meteorology website to watch the rain's progress from west to east across the state. I could see it out the window, raining heavily into the grey concrete streets. Beautiful, life-giving water. We are so thirsty. Can only hope the rain made it into the catchments, of which ours are 32% full at last look. We need the rain, in more ways than one. Our thirsts are multi-faceted.

It is some kind of blasphemy these days to complain about the rain interrupting our social lives. Beggars cannot be choosers, after all. And I don't mind so much today. I am tired in my soul, melancholy (which is a different beast than the depression and grief I've been smothered by over the past two years. Those are lifting, but that doesn't mean the melancholy does not pay its recurring visits. Indeed, I don't mind its visiting. Melancholy spurs me on to be creative. And there are, after all, many things to mourn about in our world, and some of those are in my own heart.) Perhaps it is right that this Advent, so many of us seem to be spending dry periods, the empty waiting that burns. Life is sometimes just unutterably sad. We do reel to and fro these days, don't we? The hope remains though, a living miracle, peering anxiously at the skies while we gnaw on our fears and sadnesses. But the Christ will be born. Even while we feel we will wither away on the inside, our organs just drying up and disintegrating from the lack of water. This is the mystery. I have gone through an entire 4B pencil for the first time in decades, while in the midst of feeling like I am so creatively withered I shall never bloom. The faith sits in the midst of the broken pottery shards, even while it drags them across its own skin. Some say it is double-mindedness. I say it's integration.

Christmas this year is a pretty low-key event where I am living. Which is fine by me. Funny, though, that the previous two Christmases have been almost unbearable for me in some ways, being stuck in such a bad place. This year feels different with the fog lifting. And anyway, apart from that, I am just patently tired of deconstructing the guts out of everything. It is a necessary thing to do, and I actually really enjoy it, but still. Deconstructing when you are so dry yourself is always a danger, like flicking cigarette butts out into the bush. I want to look ahead, forward, at what is being constructed around our ears and our eyes, though we cannot see it and doubt its existence. Because we must ask these questions, seeing we are the ones who do the reconstructing.

I still think Christmas is an empty ritual at it's heart. The thing is, we have so few rituals that we share as a people that I am almost hungry for it this year. And when I remove myself from my deconstructing and analysing, I can just say that I am really looking forward to seeing my dear cousin Andrea and her boys on Christmas Eve, and going to her church with her to sing carols, and then going out to took at the pretty lights on the pretty houses.

Which is some sort of miracle in itself too :) There are always miracles, even in the dark, even in the sadness.