Navigation / Christmas Day 10

I trooped down the stairs at what Teo calls "the brown house," our Birch Hill log home, into the darkness. I’d promised him I’d be back in a minute, after getting out of pajamas and getting into clothes for our MWF swimming gig. I promised him skiing as well, and was putting on the three layers which zero-to-plus-ten-degrees requires when I decided to check the temps.

It was minus 10. Even here on the hill. That meant more like minus 25 down in the hollow. And it also meant, I didn’t want to go skiing. Skate skiing can work down to zero. But it’s really marginal after that. Herringboning uphill isn’t all that much fun, especially with a 50 pound kid carrier dragging behind.

So, a lot less "cross" dressing, that is, dressing for two very different activities on one body in one morning. We were out the door without even any food, since we’d be back in an hour and a half.

But when we got to the pool, the normal ended. Matteo didn’t wait for me to get in the water to clutch my neck, to make us a two-headed buoy bobbing around, cheek to cheek, singing, watching others play, clinging.

Instead, he chose the green noodle marched down the steps into the drink, threw his arms over the noodle (with butt-buoyancy already attached), and launched.

Of course his next move was to grab hold of the side of the pool. But that only lasted about five minutes. I challenged him to "swim" across the pool, "you can tell Mama you swam across ALL BY YOURSELF," and, with no further urging, he did just that.

I was beside myself with joy, relief and pride. Finally! (If you’ve been reading along in the past month, you understand...) My previous frustration instantly vanished. But that was minor in the face of Teo’s disarming grin. I think he didn’t know that he could do it.

He moves by hanging vertically in the water, arms on his noodle, with a ball in one hand and a bucket in the other, not kicking but "walking" with his feet. And between breathing a little harder, he keeps up a patter, "I tell Mama Teo is a BIG BOY. Mama be VERY PROUD. Teo BIG BOY, very BRAVE." It was fetching. Suddenly, we were having a lot of fun, too. Splashing, laughing, going in circles, chasing balls.

When we got back home, there was a message from Marin on the machine. She had an appointment with the gynecologist. She found out that "Pepita" has turned, she/he’s in birth position. Yaay!

The tenth day of Christmas. Ten lords a leaping, five for Matteo’s grin, and five for Pepita’s navigational kicking.

Flix Flickering / Christmas Day 9

We’ve been giving these "twelve days of Christmas" gifts, many of them family support and service opportunities, like making fresh bread every couple weeks for Marin and the family, or like the chore of wrangling movies for weekend nights, or making supper while Marin's at work so we can invite friends over for nice evenings now that our house is big enough.

So, yesterday, New Years Day, after we took a family walk in the dawning winter light down in Craemer’s Field, Marin and Teo took off for a New Years dinner at a friend’s, and I took some Papa time.

The plan was to finish reading up on Unitarian worship. There’s a book just published, Worship that Works, written by a couple of pastors who took a sabbatical and visited some thrity-five congregations known for vital worship, half Unitarian, half not. What they discovered, is that when worship (and the communities it nurtures) is working, it changes lives.

But I got sidetracked into one of those twelve-day gifts. I sidled into Netflix, one of the aspects of the gift of "spiritually literate" movies I gave Marin. It’s always fun to "shop" for experiences. Though it did remind me of a paragraph I read in a Salon.com movie critic’s look back on the year, which probably describes what I was up to:

"(We talked about) Netflix queues not just as lists of titles but as dream outlines of the people we'd like to be -- you, or I, might be a person who watched "Masculine Feminine" three times before returning it; who had every intention of getting through "Hiroshima Mon Amour" but ultimately sent it off in the pouch, unwatched; who is glad to have seen "The Passion of Joan of Arc" but also relieved at the prospect of never having to watch it again. Through movies, we collect bits of ourselves, and sometimes we reject parts of ourselves, too."

It was like being a kid in a candy shop. I can’t navigate my local Blockbuster, but I can find cool fun challenging films online, using Spirituality and Practice "best movies of (year)" on one screen and Netflix on the other.

But with a baby coming, I keep thinking that the real challenge, the "dream outline of the person I’d like to be," has to do with more deeply experiencing grace and hope in the context of a growing, evolving family.

Iffy Love / Advent Day 19

I love everybody
especially you. Lyle Lovett

At Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village, the large bell gongs four times an hour, and you stop to love that moment. To breathe into that conversation. To notice the colors, the smells of that specific task. To remember your life, its beginning and its ending, so you can savor this chapter of your life, this paragraph, this phrase in its wondrous, ex-nihilo conception.

I sat up this morning at 6:01 am. We’re still sleeping upstairs in the living room, though the ventilation unit is installed, and the scant bedroom radon should be way scant now. In the dark, I sensed Marin semi-horizontal on the loveseat, trying to find some kind of comfort, being the living construction site for a fast-growing little baby. Matteo was one foam mattress over, in his butt-up face-down bug position. I thought, now would be the time to meditate. To actively love the moment, to breathe, to notice colors and smells, to remember beginnings and endings.

I’m writing instead, drinking coffee, pushing my way into a crowded subway car of my life, checking my transit map to try to figure out which line I transfer to in how many stops, and wondering if it will be obvious when I get there how I get a transfer, and will I arrive on time, and does it matter anyway. . .

There’s always a couple of weeks leading up to Christmas when I am thinking, I love everybody, especially you. I used to translate that into getting Alaska gifts for everyone in my immediate family and something thoughtful for everyone else, the people I love as friends and those who has been, as Esther used to say, over and again, "good to me." "You’re good to me, Cheffrey." Then there were the sermons to write and the long lines at the post office and suddenly, there’s Christmas in the rear view mirror.

So, I’ve been thinking it over again, how can I better love the people I love, to let their goodness permeate my heart, and to get past my misguided impulse to think myself more capable than I am, resulting in no love just blame: harping at my missed deadlines, unanswered letters, draft Christmas letter, my short temper. My best of intentions swirl into the stratosphere while actual flesh-and-blood relationships sail effortlessly apart like stars in an expanding universe.

"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." Now there’s a thought on how to love the people you love. Open a new entrance into your safe, secure life where others can find shelter, nurture, sustenance. Lay down the welcome mat, if not the whole shebang. Martrydom (dying for the revolution), as they say, is the easy part.

Note: I always help Jesus along here in John chapter 15, by de-linking this stunning and brilliant thought from the next: "Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you."

"If?" Can there be "ifs" in this realm?

Isn’t the power and glory found in the "unconditionality" of friendship, family? I suspect an anthropologist could make a strong argument that unconditionality is what what makes us fully human. Relationships work, they are miraculous and transforming when they are unconditional. Simply stated: we love because it’s in our nature to love, not because someone makes themselves easy to love. The harder to love, the more remarkable loving becomes.

Writing the gospel of John, pre-dawn mornings before going to work in first century Asia Minor, the authors lost their focus. From memories of what Jesus actually said, they fleshed out what stands as the most anti-semetic text of the Bible. They inserted a lot of huge, historically supremely tragic "ifs."

Advent, a time for weeding the ifs from the garden of our loves.

Tree Story / Advent Day 1

Marin came home Saturday with a sleeping baby (we drive Teo in the car to get him to relax enough to go down) and with a Christmas tree. Turns out it was shipped up here from Oregon. And it had to stay inside the house so it wouldn’t freeze. So it was in the entry downstairs.

Matteo was enthralled, it was the first thing he said after rousing from his nap on Saturday, "where the tree?" drawing out the final word as if he were chanting, which is how he talks just now, learning language hand over fist.

Later she came back from mid-afternoon Yoga with a tree stand. The ritual circumcision, baptism, and resurrection of the tree followed, before Marin and the Toot took off for an evening visit to friends, giving me sermon time.

We wrapped the Teo-sized, full, elegant (what we’d never find in a baby tree up here) fir with lights and hung many traditional Kuizenga things, like sewn and stuffed fruit, on Sunday evening.

Then Marin pronounced the moment. Matteo was enlisted in turning off all the house lights. We stood back and sang. Silent Night. O Tannenbaum.

Later we opened a Christmas tree shaped Advent Calendar made of little boxes, which Marin found at Starbucks. Each box holds a chocolate, and when the drawer is removed and re-inserted, the tree begins to mosaic together a new picture of something. I’m still not sure what it might be. I know it’s definitely not a nice picture of a mother and child and donkeys and moo-cows and all that. It’s something less "specific."

That’s one of our dilemmas, we post-Christians. The good stories get lost.