DSC02142 It is early.  I can't sleep, had my 7 hours so I am up.  The sun isn't but I am.  It is cold, so cold out, but my easy chair is warm.  The burning candle smells better than the plastic tree we can keep on most of the time.  If the sky was a bit nicer I would have gone out shooting photos looking up at the sky, but the sky is grey with a thick overcast of clouds.  And I have a Christmas song stuck in my head.

I am sitting, all is quiet, all is calm, and I have a reminder of the nature of this HolyDay season in my mind.  The Love of "I AM" The nature of being it seems to me is to love, to call all of the beings to their nature.  The reminder of the love of the holy one to enter into this world not through fanfare, not through a grand entrance, but to enter the world through the most common of ways in the most common of days through the most common of people.    There is lots of magic, real magic in the story of the birth of G-D, but the real magic I think comes in the acceptance, the acceptance of the common by the divine.   And not just acceptance of birth as common, but the insistence of life and the experience of all of creations existence through the experience of the one common man. 

I wonder however if the Life of the Christ Child could really be called common.  There were not three wise men around my crib.  Well there were, wise men, but none that read about it in the papers and brought gifts from foreign lands at least. Not common.  Not many were chased out of town as an infant through a dream into a foreign land, just to return after the king died.  Not common.  Not too many can keep the party going after the wine runs out.  Not Common.  But what might be common are The trials the struggle, the getting past when things don't go right the drama that pops up in each of our lives that we have no control over.    An ordained Sufi friend taught me to be thankful for my troubles, and I try to be, but certainly I wouldn't have wanted Mary and Josephs troubles raising such a child, for even the son of God had to learn to walk.   We all seem to have certain gifts, and I am sure it was testing of all of the gifts God gave to Joseph and Mary in order to bring up Jesus.

For me The Magic of Christmas is in the story and the acceptance of the creator.   And while we are so far removed from the Jew that Jesus was raised to be, he still had the experiences we have today.  We are born we grow up, we struggle, we get sick, we share in Joy and Hope and Love in life and through life, and in the end we die.  And while we surround ourselves with different things, and different drama in our lives and in our world, I don't know that it is all that different.  Certainly Life is the best experience that Life can give, It isn't the stuff, Not the things, the jobs, the places, the tools, clothes, governments, technologies, even the individuals that makes life special, But it is Life that makes Life special.  And ours has been shared by our creator, and if that isn't the best act of Love I don't know what is.

Here I sit in front of our plastic tree, lit by lights with lots of colorful gifts under it.   I am in awe, not of the things that are under it, but of the Life and the Love it represents.  I still have a song running through my head.  "I Believe".