El Norte Report: More Changes

The weather yesterday and today was not like in the accompanying photo. (More on that below…) I was just playing around with stills from an earlier video and came up with one I liked. That, and I haven’t been gettting out to take new photos. What the hell.

Maybe I’m rebelling. Part of it is the Christmas thing, for sure. I pay less attention every year, yet the world around me goes stumbling through the motions just the same. This year, especially, something about it feels so false. Empty. Maybe even wrong. I can’t really say why, it just does.

The two things I care most about this time of year are the solstice and my wife. Her own views about how people “celebrate” this season are evolving, too. For the last two years, she’s given over the usual holiday rigamarole for chamber music concerts in the first week of January. She has to practice, in other words, requiring great focus and single-minded ordering of her affairs.

The resulting simplification of older Christmas practices has been a godsend to me, frankly, because while I’ve come to understand the origins of my antipathy toward the holiday, it still makes me tense. I’m still the cultural outsider, torn between wanting to play nice and resisting ever more mightily the very idea. That’s always been a mess with me, and I could stand to have the whole thing go away. (Either the celebration or my head can leave, either one will do!) The return of the sun is a very big deal, however, and fills me with a sense of urgency. I want to get on with life, and the holiday hoo-rah is an exceedingly ill-timed distraction.

But no doubt I protest too much. The things my wife and I have done together do have meaning, obviously. We used to drag out “the Christmas box,” the one with all the decorations from years past, and hang them all around the house. “Awwww, remember this?” Etc. etc. We may do that again someday when my wife isn’t practicing at the same time, but maybe not. For now we both enjoy and need a more uncluttered feel, more physical and psychic space.

We have a few personal rituals, of course. One of the things I do is hang a few pine branches on the front door, and sometimes I put up a few lights. (There have to be lights to help the sun come back, everybody knows that.) This year I decorated the saloon, the little room with a bar, a sofa, and the woodstove, where we spend most of our winter hours, and that was fun. But I don’t go out and buy a bunch of presents, just a few things if the spirit moves me. Fortunately for all concerned, I’m always moved to get something for my wife. Not a matter of “playing nice,” either. This is special and I must attend. (Her own spirit is wide-open at this time of year.)

Overall, however, as with a growing list of other human customs and institutions, it seems that something is definitely coming to an end. I don’t know what “it” is, but I feel the dried husk slipping off our collective shoulders. This is for the good, and I’m not worried. At the same time, I don’t want to do anything to keep the old ways going. Just let them rot. Let them rot and turn to compost for the spring of all Creation. If I’m projecting here, it’s still all right, because we don’t know the half of it. We don’t know the tenth of it. I may be angry, but I’m also feeling stronger all the time. Like when I went out and gathered those greens…

There wasn’t any wind. The temperature was 35° F. The ground was frozen and covered with snow, but the sun was shining brightly, and I wasn’t cold. Everything was still and magical, this on a day when it got down to zero the night before! And there were bluebirds, too. We have them here year-round.

I’m alive right now to be a part of all this. There has to be a reason, not addressed by by anything I read or hear.

Related posts:

1. Sunday El Norte Report!
2. Merry Christmas to My Wife
3. Christmas 2008
4. New Year? What New Year??
5. Practice Report [Updated]