White Christmas

My father and I had opened our presents and were standing in the kitchen as I was preparing to go play with my toys and then travel to my grandpa's house for dinner. I looked out the window and said "is that drizzle or snow?" "I don't think it's quite cold enough for that," my dad said with a chuckle. I think I actually heard his jaw drop as he walked to the window.

It's Christmas and it's snowing...

There's something about this sort of blessing, an untouchable magic that seems able only to be felt by all the senses in unison.

There's a quiet in snowfall, plapable. It's as though our soul reaches out and feels the landscape as itself, breathing as the wind, thoughts flying through the sky from beyond reckoning and melting on the ground into nothing. True sight.

I stood watching my cat, elated that I left the door open so he could run in and out freely. The same perfect oddity of it all consumed me as well, and so I stayed with him as the snowflakes collected on our fur. A memory of last night came to me then, one where I was petting my little friend...

This memory reached yet further into my past, to the time I first got him. Recently divorced, my heart was a tattered mess. I had been without a cat for two years, the first time since I was born. Ehm was certainly a godsend. He would ride on my shoulders, draped over my neck like a fur on the long commute from school to home. White with a raccoon's tail, he was the most loving cat I had (and have) ever known. I poured the love I had stirred for my wife into him. To love is an action in part, an activity complete with a muscle group. I had learned what it was to trust absolutely; only with complete faith can we love totally. By this I mean a release of all thoughts of how something can go wrong. This is pure dedication, to resolve to entertain no notion of life going askew. Dangerous? Quite. Rationality is abandoned for hope and relentless faith. There is no stopping to assess; there is only the stalwart walk to the driving, beating drums within. Our voice becomes the Valkyrie's song and our strength becomes that of the army of heaven. I have gone from personal love to spiritual, but I assure you they are one and the same. To learn to fully love a person is to do the same for Love itself, for God, for devotion. The most blissful space for lovers is the air between them, and to reach it, each lover must let go of her self, of her body, of her mind, and in this know heaven on earth. It is the same with God.

So petting my cat last night I remembered the love I once poured into him, my heart wide open though bleeding. I didn't have a care if he understood my love for him, I just poured because it was all I could do. I realized last night that I have become more reserved, cautious, and silently hoping with a small voice in my heart that he understood my love for him. How did this fear enter? Is this fear not spoken with my love as it comes, does it not become the very hesitancy and misunderstanding that it feared to be in the first place! I see that it does, and in this my love is reinforced by my logic. Today the only thing that makes sense is love, unbridled, supremely vibrant and unstoppably intelligent. I heard a voice as the snow fell on my face... "today you are born unto me."

It just started snowing again. I have one last thought. As I stood in the soft falling crystals, I sensed my father in the house next door. I felt him crying, crying wholesome tears over the letter I wrote him for Christmas. I told him how much he means to me, how much I appreciated everything, how I acknowledge his dreams for me and have found a truth between his own values and mine. There is a land that each of us share in the space between our bodies, and somewhere there is a center, the sum of all hearts and minds, and there we find purpose; there we find meaning, and there we find Love.

Merry Christmas