I'll be home for Christmas

December 23rd 2023. 

I had been debating whether or not to bake gingerbread cookies this year. I always do some form of baking, at least I have, ever since my boys were little (but old enough to cutely disobey and eat the raw dough while helping me). I decided to do it. I like preparing dough, adding the spices (ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg), the lemon zest from my friends' lemon tree, and my cookie cutters, especially the moose. I like the red of the ribbons I will use to tie packages of those fragrant offerings from my kitchen. I busy myself, with Nutcracker music in the background, and later on Ken starts a fire until his son joins us for dinner. All presents are not wrapped but with the fire, the candles and my improved setup with toys and rosemary branches, it is beginning to look a lot like Christmas... I am at the House of Enchantments. I am home for pre-Christmas.

December 24th. I must finish using the dough that worked out so nicely yesterday. I decided last minute to pack some of those simple, but delicious and delicate treats for my family. My papa especially loves ginger cookies. I don't recall having made this recipe for him, ever. I want to thank him for picking me up at the airport (I hope the moose doesn't crack during the trip. Of course it did). As the day unfolds, with an unexpectedly high number of leaves rotting on my large deck and floating on my pool (and even more at the bottom), I must part with the idea of sitting down to read. And go roller-blading. The mental holiday utopia list sheds its elements at the speed my oak trees are dropping leaves in my pool. No more time to buy this extra present. No time to send this card to a friend who has been ill before Christmas (I will do so in January). No time to do a laundry load of pale. I have time to cook my veggies and create an improptu lunch (I will include the easy recipe in another blog) but I don't have time to freeze the juice from all Meyer lemons offered by my dear friend (whose last name is also Meyer). No time to remove all the leaves at the bottom of my pool after all (as I had to take extra time to empty the robot net bag, which was an endeavor as awkward as cleaning a microwave...). There is too much to do and I can't accomplish it all if I want to be home for Christmas... Because Ken says the song in the background applies to me this year, as I am also packing to go fly to my beloved Canada and spend time with my family, including my dear sister I have not seen for 4.5 years...

But wait... what is home anyway ? A place of birth, a new home, a relationship ? My diary, or this blog ? There is a home I am becoming acquainted with more and more, discovering its vastness by the hour. A home that welcomes everybody, including the spiritual homeless who once, like me, thought they didn't belong. It is because fundeamentally we are from nowhere, really. And this means we are from everywhere. This home is the big A ("amour" ? not quite...). Or in French, PC (no, not politically correct).

Awareness ("pleine conscience") is the main character of life, with the changing décor in the background we often confound with the main element of one's life at some point or another, whether it is love, illness, Christmas, travel, boredom, promotion, hardship, birth and rebirth. When we realize that, we can let go of the outcome once and for all and consider that our life is worthwhile and full no matter what is happening (or how it is happening) in it. It is not about the event itself that is so dependent upon contingencies beyond our control, but it is about how present we are at any given instant, and what we do with it, rather than for or against it... When we are aware, we always get something out of a situation, no matter how unpleasant or aversive it might be. We get to see, to become more conscious, and more knowledgeable of ourselves and the human condition.

Why should we cultivate awareness instead of chasing happiness: the latter is often competitive (because defined on finite resources like a partner, a beautiful home, a good job etc), while awareness is our true abundance and actually with awareness often comes a form of non-tangible resource-independent happiness called joy. Once we are aware, we stop comparing our life (or Christmas decorations) with others' because it is pointless.

Awareness is also more contagious. Happiness that we chase, often rooted in the material world, breeds envy, jealousy, bitterness, gossip, toxicity, and unproductive anger. Awareness inspires. Someone being aware, and happily aware, and awarely happy, can only invite more awareness in, if only awareness that we are not aware and would like to be ! The most bitter people I have encountered were often the least insightful and aware... Conversely, the most aware have been the most generous and divine.

I offered a mindfulness puzzle box full of six landscapes inviting meditation to my sons and wrote on the box:

Awareness is the truest abundance.

Gratitude is the only unlimited wealth.

I think I found enjoyment in simple tasks like baking or wrapping a present because I felt more aware doing them. For the New Year, I invite you to redefine work, productivity, success. Sometimes, recharging by doing nothing is productive. Going on a walk to reflect between two patients for me is work, as I work on myself and at establishing a more harmonious connection with the earth, which makes me a better, more aware healer. Meditation has been very spiritually productive for me. Only those concepts (productivity, success) should be subjected to auto-correct...

I wish us all to also redefine beauty, and what we choose to put in your body (it should be beautiful, earthly, natural...).

Beauty looks alike in its various forms because they are of one and the same light...

Ugliness seems to be different because it startles us every time, it is a mask at the image of the bearer, a treachery, an illusion trying to distract us and to block the light. 

Once we are aware, we stop clinging. We start to really believe that we have all we need. When we are aware, we live in truth, and truth doesn't need clinging (unlike lies and illusions), because truth, like love, stands on its on and is always available and doesn't need to be hoarded.

The inner chatter from past conditionings and oppression stifling my inspiration is now very faint. I follow my creative whims more than ever. In my drawers where I keep some clear and clean bags from pasta or grozen food, I found the right plastic wrappings for cookies for samples of "lovin' from the oven" to offer my men, neighbors and family. I feel like in my youth again, when I had our home basement all to myself to draw, do crafts, sew, write mini stories. I am in awe that my home has turned into an art workshop, with open seasonal drawers in every room during the creative phases, with ideas flowing out of my head faster that my hands can find the right color for a pen or paper to improvise a last-minute collage for a card.

After another intense year, I am now repositioning myself: as a person, woman, mother, partner, friend,  aunt, daughter, sister, healer, artist, poet, fellow human being.

At least I am fully aware of this. I can choose who I am, how I am it, and what home means for me. I once said that home is within and I still believe it.

May home be with you. For Christmas, New Year and beyond.