I promised myself I would stand outside the commerce and crush and simply light candles and breathe in and out and feel god and not broke, and feel love and not panic, and feel peace and not loneliness. I promised I would get the Christmas cards written this year, and make snickerdoodles and mint crinkles or some other adorable sounding cookie. I promised I would do art, and not Target, that I would faithfully water the tree, that I would slow down and find time to play with Gilligan.

And here I am, 2 days before Christmas, a small pile of presents wrapped and a clenching in my heart that worries it’s not enough. And already worries about January’s rent.

I am also staring at a stack of four boxes of unwritten Christmas cards, all with different designs but all with the word JOY on them. Four years, four boxes, 80 ignored loved ones, clients and colleagues. Apparently, every year I buy a box, forgetting who I am, and then repack the box with the Christmas stuff. And apparently, I’m in constant search of JOY.

As for the tree, I’ve watered it once. As for cookies, it’s adorable how many I’ve eaten.

As for loneliness, yes.

But also candles, and love, and peace, and art, and Gilligan, and my two grown and spectacular children. And such a deep sense of gratefulness. I am overwhelmed by the gifts of my life, and the love and sacrifice of those who have been there for me in hard times.

So I turn my thoughts from all the promises broken, to those who are grieving and without. I unpack my joy, and in your honor, I repack it for another day. For now, I stand with you in holy silence, and send to you my love.

Merry Christmas, everyone. And please, be there for those who are without.

A philosopher, a teacher, a minister, an entrepreneur and a writer walk into a bar….Why? Because we are all related to one another and can’t get through a conversation without a drink.

What is it about alcohol? That over-indulging is forgiven — when everything else isn’t? While cigarettes, fat, drugs, sugar and bread get shamed into hiding, would you like another bottle or two of wine before you go? It’s weird that over-drinking is so pervasive and yet more dangerous, surely, than ham?

Unless you are AN ALCOHOLIC – go ahead and drink! A LOT! I mean, who’s counting!? And what the heck is an alcoholic, anyway? Ask 10 people and every single one will give you a different answer. Even its definition is slurring its words.

Lest I be immediately crossed off your invite list — I love wine and booze. I carry social anxiety and it’s always helped ease me into the unknown. But I’ve just been watching how in social gatherings, when perhaps something holy is waiting to be noticed, we soak ourselves and our souls – we find ourselves knocked out by a rumpunch, or noggin off in a pool of our own nutmeg.

I think our souls are lonely and booze stands in for love. Booze binds people in what looks like intimacy, but ends up creating a false closeness; arms hurled across each other, lips locked, love flying. And then lost in the light of a headachey day.

It stands in for love, and it stands in for joy, but it spills across both because it has a hard time with limits. It has poor boundaries, and runs wildly across generations. It opens a door to what we’ve been hiding and lets loose the ugly. It gives you permission to be bitchy, opinionated, sobbing, or inappropriate. It gives you a reason and hands you an excuse. And it steals lives: It throws up its twenties. It passes out at the end of its days. It staggers out of parties into lonely cars on packed highways.

But most of the time, it just really doesn’t see things clearly. I suppose that’s the point — to blur the real. But I wonder why fun always trumps true? I wonder how many of us have lost a tolerance for silence, for real conversation, for intimacy? I wonder if anxiety will ever leave us alone if we don’t let courage build its muscles a bit?

I don’t mean to be a buzz kill. Honestly. I just wonder if drinking too much might be keeping us separate from what we all came together for to begin with.

Oh fucking Christmas! I stand outside the blur of commerce and all that’s bright and brittle. I also, though, stand outside all that’s good — throwing the baby jesus out with the bath and body water.

I do try. I try to bring light into my home. So the stupid halls are decked and the tree is up and the pine needles dig into my bare feet, but there is pain beneath the shiny and the green, and I prop myself up with an icepack on my knee and when night comes I watch tv with a bowl of anticipation perched on my lap, like a child come to whisper wishes, and mindlessly fill my ever-rounding belly.

I watch Elf, and It’s a Wonderful Life and Holiday Inn. And for some unfathomable reason, I even watch Hallmark Christmas movies. Seriously. I do. Every one is about a single woman/mother down on her luck, who magically finds love and her dreams and a glittering life complete with a fireplace. They are terrible, and I choose them as company over all that is true.

Give me something to think about; give me philosophy, the meaning of life, the universe!

Give me something to love; give me art, the tired, the poor!

Give me something to work for; a deadline, a garden, my children!

Oh, Christmas – give me something holy, and remove the vapid waste that is my lonely habit. Let it fall to the ground like a king to his knees and leave me without remote or reason to hide the tears that come, shining like lights, like stars, like love bearing gifts.

It’s a wonderful life, and it’s a hard one, but I think we like to take sides. There are moments before — when you are just a grumbling exhausted mess trying to make a goddamned living – and after, when angels are getting their wings and you are the richest man in town.

What’s interesting to me is how these two worlds can’t be civil with one another. Forget civil — we barely recognize one when we are living in the other. Maybe all children lose hearing in one ear or the other at some point? Maybe we start favoring one side early on? But there’s a little Pottersville in every Bedford Falls; while you cheerily lasso the moon there are those who are bankrupt and bereft. And while you lose everything you love, somewhere there’s snow falling on a small town steeple.

When you expect everything to be one way or the other, you may end up on a bridge ready to jump the first time your banister breaks. Carry Zuzu’s petals with you — a reminder that the lovely and the fallen both live in your pocket.

And remember: you know you are alive because your mouth is bleeding. The wound is real – and life is wonderful.

In the winter night
When the stars are endless
And your breath sighs white

Somewhere there’s a fire in a hearth
And a cutting board and apple
And a table being set

Outside of this
Maybe a fox behind you in the trees
And a frozen twig that breaks like glass

Beneath your lonely feet
The path is narrow
And the pine is always green

Before you go
Gather garlands of silence
And carry them home

Each time you take to the woods
A tribute to the winter night
You walked alone.

Clearly we are missing something. From one mass shooting to the next, clearly nothing is happening. Nothing is sinking in. And I think what’s not sinking in, is pain.

If we don’t deeply feel the suffering; if it doesn’t break us open; we are left in body bags and standing at grave sites and sitting in pews with our kevlar vests and our praying hands and neither works without taking the pain back into the world with a more profound understanding.

Get out of your mind with the loss of it, and if you did that, if you really did that, you would not be arming yourself for the next onslaught, but preparing for it by caring more deeply for the world.

We don’t need to be better defended. That’s a primitive response to pain and it’s horrifying to watch a nation retreat into such childish ways. We need to stop protecting ourselves and feel the fucking pain, so we can wake up and take better care of the world; why else have laws?

Suffer well, and you are the ones who will go forward and care for the world. Suffer fools, and you’ll cause the world to suffer more.

In the blurry narrative of the world

It’s good to see clearly what’s written before us

And a relief to find a magnified view

And a comfort to share a language.

Curled on a chair in the winter rain

We arrive without edit;

The only missteps are when we forget where we are

Which is bound to happen in the middle of long stories

With many chapters

And bookmarks made of flotsam and fit.

There are passages we must reread, of course

And words we must look up

And those we make up entirely,

But in all this precious history

We now hold

A rare edition in our careful hands;

Never published, without genre,

Without end,

We return again and again;

Each time another scribble added in the margin

A newfound emphasis

Here,

Or there.

We will not be found on the bestseller list

And the reviews are forever out;

But in the fresh ink

And fragile pages

We know every word of this

Co-authored heart

In preparation of the coming dark

and the rising star

and the industry and commerce that surrounds us

with ribbon and receipt

I hereby declare

This December

To be one of mercy and light

Where all persons herein

That may be found curled around a wine glass

Or Kleenex or cheeseball

Or standing alone under an empty sky

May know with official proclamation that

They are well remembered and that

We all stand with you, now or once or soon

While snow falls inside you

And skaters spin without you

And winter comes again.

 

And while you are of course invited to walk among the carolers

Or have some figgy pudding

You are hereby released

From all your spanx and circumstance

From clenching smile and skinny-girl cheer

And may come as you are with a tear streaked face

Without a spangled sweater

Or a hostess gift

And may choose not to sing or to

Stay where you are

Without a story to bring to grandmother’s house

For let it be said that all who enter

This holy month

With or without a prayer or a hope

Will be greeted with comfort

And joy will meet you in your own sacred time

To place you back in the cradle

Of the world.

Descending into irony, and close up topics like spangled sweaters, is a signal to go deeper and look broader across the enormity of this horizon; delving and thinking with the deep and the thoughtful, like Proust, Rilke, Rumi, O’Donahue, where one simple line can hold the weight and the beauty of the heaviest fruit and return for you to feast upon time after time, long after the season has died and the trees are bare.

And I am fearful of the way I skim and skip across the water using the rhythm of the stones to carry all sound, delighting with a flick of the wrist and the familiar use of childish ways, but taking us back to where we’ve already been and staying on top to avoid the stilt and the stir, to avoid losing my way in these mired, muddied depths.

Am I here to herald simple words that adhere to bumpers and jingles; is the whole of my truth already sung? Or is it that I’d rather be loved than known? The words that come nimbly and quickly jump over candlesticks without touching the flame, curled in nurseries calling goodnight to the moon. They grew in a tree in Brooklyn, in the back of a wardrobe, in a secret garden; but the ones I long to speak stay silent at 20,000 leagues, in the belly of the whale, in distant moors and cobbled, shadowed streets.

And what use, this pursuit of the ordinary? If I can’t make lovely a simple branch, or unbury the lost from the floor of the sea, what use am I? Oh the places you’ll go, when compared to a summer’s day; Oh red fish, blue fish is this winter of my discontent! Until I know my voice, my words are neither here nor there, or anywhere, close to the depths beneath me.