Christmas morning seems like a celebration of all the small things about who we individually are. I sit in our wrapper strewn bed draped in my new scarf before I am even dressed. This scarf is both the fulfilment of a desire born a month or so ago and also a mirror of my taste that reconfirms my sense of who I am. Yes, it’s a ‘successful’ present!
However this year, because of the heart breaking events that surround us all, this all seems a bit fragile, a bit small light that is precariously flickering in the face of a lot of darkness. Our bed may be covered in the debris of presents while the messages from friends ping in but it doesn’t take much imagination to guess what this morning feels like in Palestine and the Ukraine - just for instance.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this, I certainly don’t want to go down the scrooge route and say because of all the pain and hatred in the world we can’t celebrate Christmas. However, there is something nibbling on the edge of my thoughts about the fragility of self - even a self adorned with fairy lights - and the adamantine imperturbability of the intrinsic awareness that is our buddha-nature.
How strange is this contrast. As I sit I can rest my attention on the small room in which we practice and be caught up in - washed away by - all the thoughts in my head. And then, with the merest moment of mindfulness, I can switch the attention to the awareness in which all these sensations and appearances are happening and it instantly opens out into something spacious that is free of the burden of ‘me’. Doing this today I just have a sense that there is a journey going on - maybe because of trying to do this practice for so long and maybe because I am just getting much older, (here I note I could not just write OLD). A transition in which my sense of self is located not (only) in all the small and impermanent things that I think of as myself but (also) in something that, as I write, conveys itself as the vastness of the clear night sky.
Maybe that it is it. Maybe what I sense this Christmas morning is my changing nature that moves towards death. My body placed in or on the ground and metamorphosing into many new forms, the entirety of its energy not diminished by taking on a set of different appearances. So maybe I’m writing about Christmas after all, not the Christmas of King Canute trying the ignore the horror of the world that laps at his toes, but another Christmas which happens each time we relocate our identity from the vulnerability of powerless isolation to an awareness that is big enough to contain an entire universe. A dawning of the light accessed over and over again.
NW. Christmas day, 2023
Comments