Love Note #9: Beneath All That Glitters

Dear Ones -

Warm greetings as we enter this season of celebration and the sacred turning from the heart of darkness to the returning light. I'm writing to you about turning our attention toward the holy in our holi-days.

This profound spiritual doorway has become clouded by shopping lists, social obligations, and the relentless pressure to manufacture cheer. Our culture has buried the deep medicine of this holy time under a mountain of tinsel and tasks.

But beneath all that glitters lies an ancient invitation. It's in the darkest night, in the longest night, that things are stripped from us. In this stripping away, we're given a precious opportunity—to turn from distractions, to hear silence calling, to see the bare branches against the sky. And yes, when things are stripped from us, emotions that our distractions have held at bay may rise. Yet in this very bareness, in this simplicity, we're invited to turn toward the elemental–the ground of our being.

There is a great source of love and joy at the bottom of the well, at the center of the dark, in the core of your heart. Though I grew up celebrating Christmas, I open to the profound and universal nature of this time and honor all forms that acknowledge it. Each night during this season, when the house is quiet, I sit in the dark living room with only the tree lights glowing, feeling the profound metaphor—the roots and branches, the wedding of heaven and earth, the light and the silence, the silence itself. Here we can breathe into and acknowledge the unseen, the pure and undecorated source of our existence.

I invite you to use this season as a symbolic invitation to find your own way to bow to this silence—in small ways and large. Perhaps pause on your drive somewhere to step out and look at the stars. Maybe hold someone's hand and invite them into silence with you. You might even invite a whole table of relatives into a moment of silence for whatever it is you find most beautiful. Create your own rituals, take moments out for the silent, the potential, the depth.

All my life, I have been searching for, as the musician Donovan sings, that which I cannot see. When we put our eggs in the basket of the Holy, we're invited to listen to a different drummer. There is so much conditioning around the holidays that can lure us into measuring ourselves by the cultural, the familial yardstick. I invite you to refuse that again and again, and to remember what called you to this deeper way of being, to return to moving from the inside out, rather than the outside in. Listen below the din to what lies beneath all celebration—sink toward the center, toward source. Let your song rise from there: longing, anguish, or joy—all are welcome in this holy dark.

In the name of the most high, the most deep, the most lit, the most dark, the most beautiful source of everything that we are and know—to your tender heart, I send my blessings.

With love,

Jeannie

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