The Christmas Machine and The Child of Wonder

Like the earthquake we endured only 3 miles from the epicenter this month here at Adytum, my heart was shaken hard yesterday as I tried running with the herds in the malls for a few wretched hours. I will take control of this Season of Light and let the shaking open the doors of my heart once again to sense the Wonder Child’s residing there, offering hope to the world and forgiveness for our failings. This is the Gift of the Season, no matter what ends up under the soaring Christmas tree in the Tower Room.

Thanksgiving has accomplished the majority of the goals of the season: the ingathering of family and friends after their diaspora of summer life. We kept the meal simple, time in the lovely Adytum kitchen to a minimum and lots of emphasis poring over old photos that showed how long we’ve all loved each other. It was rich and noble. Enduring.

The next day for the first time ever, my daughter and I tried joining with thousands of Black Friday shoppers at the mall while some brake work on her Honda was being done nearby.  What a jolt from the peaceful, deep time we’d just had at Adytum. The complete lack of parking, the flood of people, overwhelming scents in the shops, the red “sale” signage pasted everywhere seeking to manipulate shoppers into overspending for fear of missing a deal, the inability to walk a straight line at a decent pace…never again. My senses, my mind ,and my spirit were so effectively overwhelmed that it took a lot of time to recover from the experience. It left me frazzled and exhausted emotionally. Not only that, but it just felt wrong deep down. I walked out with nothing except some supplies for a box we were preparing for a solider and a sense that I was compromising my integrity and the vow to never do it again in this way.

Arriving back at the sanctuary of Adytum, seeing the lovely bright lights Donn draped over the little evergreens and around the entry were calming and full of hope as the darkness increases yet another month before the Solstice. Our dear friend left a tree in my absence at the entry; over 15’ tall, and we joked as we tried to drag it with all our power up the stairs and into the Tower Room. Wresting it into the special tree stand designed for enormous trees was risking our lives, literally for me at least. One wrong move and I’d be crushed under the weight of all the beauty and glory that resided in the tree plantation just hours before, as it had for the past 7 years preparing for this day.

How appropriate to live out the story that my spirit sensed in the city’s mall earlier by coming home to struggle with this Behemoth Christmas tree: life is full of fine lines and delicate balances. Ignore this and risk being crushed under the assumed glory and beauty of it all.  Later when I saw a humorous face book posting about entering this religious season where everyone seeks out the mall of their choice, instead of place of worship of their choice, it all fell into place…

This season I will not be consumed by the Christmas Machine with all its assumed glory and beauty that just ends up in percentage gains posted on the financial market boards post season. We have a large family and I’ve felt such a sense of responsibility making Christmas “happen” for everyone. Like a cloak I am shedding, I am not going to pick that up this false sense of responsibility again.

I’ve been known to be a late bloomer…Donn laughs and says, “You’re just now figuring all this out?”  He’s been on this journey longer than I and avoided the holiday crush long ago. I thought his avoidance was a “man thing” and took up the slack with renewed vigor not realizing I didn’t have to do it either. We will give the great gift of Christmas to ourselves this year. What’s good for us will be good for the rest of our family.

I will retreat into the simplicity, beauty and peace that will define the next month at Adytum. Instead of focusing on all the parties, gifts to yet buy, meals to plan and shopping to get those meals on the table, the focus will be on one thing:

The birth of the Christ Child, The Child of Wonder being born once again in our hearts. Taking our humble offer of room in our “inn” and turning it into a palace fit for the birth of a great King. The twelfth century Persian Sufi poet Rumi taught: “…only the unsayable, jeweled inner life matters.” In order to remain true to my matrix, the core values that make life meaningful, creating sacred space in this Adytum of my heart to know this Child of Wonder more fully is the emphasis and gift of the season.

The fresh, clean scent of the forest fills Adytum because of the spontaneous sharing of our friend. It is not the manufactured “Christmas in a Can” I was encouraged to pay for yesterday to create a Christmas ambiance here.  We are the fragrance of the Christ Child: our acts of love, generosity and kindness to man and nature, birds and beasts. And to our “selves” as we shed responsibilities that were never ours, but were foisted upon us by the makers of the Christmas machine. In the mall, there was nothing of the Child of Wonder to be found alive.

When Nietzsche declared God was dead it left man with the inability to cope with the need for forgiveness.  “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”—Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Section 125, tr. Walter Kaufmann

The simple birth of the Child of Wonder born anew in our hearts offers the answer to Nietzsche’s astute observation: we need this Child. We have allowed this season to assume the Behemoth proportions of a Christmas Machine designed to boost the national economy, to crush us under the weight of our frazzled nerves and destroy the fruit of everything that Thanksgiving achieved: the ingathering of friends and family, the increase of our love and the ties that bind us. To find the Child of Wonder and commune with Him in the beauty of our jeweled inner selves, to focus on looking out for the needs of others, whether man or beast, and the spontaneous giving that results; the joy in simple companionship and the gratitude that supersedes it all: This is Christmas.

The "Safe House" is Inside

We’ve put our heart, soul, time, energy and of course a lot of money into opening the sanctuary Adytum. Yet in the final analysis, our energy is best spent cultivating the things that endure, the inner life, the sanctuary of the human spirit and focusing on what we can control…

As the earth shifted under my feet at 7:42 this morning in a 4.2 magnitude earthquake, so my focus shifts back to the unshakable core of life: the strength of spirit, life’s true purpose and the things that will remain standing no matter what hits on the surface – faith, hope and love remain.

If the high winds of yesterday that toppled trees and left many without power, and earthquake this morning had reduced all our hard work of building Adytum to rubble in a moment’s time, it’s comforting to be assured that we would still inhabit the “safe house” of our spirit. We have our personal portable sanctuary well-tended and supplied with all the essentials of a happy, abundant life. Windstorms, earthquakes, fire and flood have no power to destroy the invisible.

Yesterday, the Pacific Northwest sun assured us of her presence for exactly three minutes out of the entire rain swept day, just before branding golden brilliance into the mountainside and sliding away. High winds immediately lashed out at dusk, throwing fir branches from nearby trees like arrows against this house of glass...75 windows at last count. Each November the trees hurl their wooden missiles at the glass, some sending entire branches to break in splinters on the roof. The force is so great that large limbs will be driven like stakes into the ground. A few nights of tree warfare and we were cured.

Yesterday Paul’s Tree Service arrived with their boom truck; a bucket and lift ready to transport them to the tree tops to cut “danger trees” down in segments with huge chainsaws. Grady and Paul guided the precise direction of the fall with strong wires, roping in Donn and Pablo to pull with them on the hardest trees where the chance of real damage to existing structures was the greatest. There is a real art to dropping a tree. They all did a great job; I took pictures from a safe distance.

Danger trees…a new word learned since building here four years ago. Basically there is a fine line between forest land conservation and responsible homeownership. As newbies, we erred on the line of conservation, leaving far too many trees close to the house in our early initiation. Now we have to face the fact that our decision leaves us, our guests and Adytum in danger, and we spent dearly to fix the problem after the fact.

Paul cut about half a dozen trees down, some small but deadly snags aptly called “widow makers”; brittle old trees growing up inside established trees, or dead limbs hung up in live branches waiting to make their fatal impaling earthbound exit. A tall tree of small girth, we learned, can shatter high above unexpectedly sending shards or the entire tree down with deadly impact on unsuspecting souls beneath even in windless conditions. The work was complete just before the high winds arrived last night.

Today I prepared to clean up all the bits and pieces of last night’s windstorm off the decks, patios and porches when Adytum endured yet another blast – a 4.2 magnitude earthquake with the epicenter just three miles east of us. Maybe the proximity to the epicenter is why it registered with us as an underground explosion rather than the usual rock and roll we’ve all endured. Standing in the Tower Room with glass going about 30 feet up all around, watching it act like it was about to explode into the room…then at the last possible second return to normal was terrifying. Things that are solid are supposed to be solid! What an illusion the notion of any kind of stability is in today’s world is…the financial markets are excellent recent example. The usual “shake and sway” never manifested and we were left in those initial minutes trying to determine if our natural gas line into the house had exploded underground. The news verified the quake minutes later.

Adytum’s construction is sound and true thanks to the careful craftsmanship of Elite Builders, NW – our son’s construction company. I thanked him for that when I called to let him know all was well at Adytum. We’ve watched this castle house survive the tremendous windstorms every November without flinching: like a lighthouse taking a battering from the sea Adytum remains after the intensity has swept over her. Now being nearly on top of the epicenter of a significant earthquake and absorbing the shock with a determined grace, Adytum still stands strong, an example for those of us who read something into everything. Grace under pressure, Kennedy once remarked…

The quake preceded by the terrific force of the wind last night has left a plaque lying face down on the courtyard outside. Putting it back on the wall, Dante’s words read, “Nature is the art of God”. Sounds so sweet… The beautiful sunsets we enjoy at “happy hour” where the skies celebrate day's end in explosions of pure color are a love gift. But there is a flipside to this artistry: the terrible majesty of November’s storms, blowing in off Lake Mayfield to batter against this glass house with torrents of wind driven rain and hail. Ancient fir near the house bending like California palm trees with the gale, shored up by our prayers that they stand firm and spare the house. Now the occasional shifting of middle earth, letting pent up pressure off in an explosion of terrific force. Inside we enjoy nature’s art in peace and safety.

Adytum is built on solid rock. Still the cleansing winds and the convulsive shockwave of the earth beneath my feet remind me that everything I see can change instantly; be leveled or worse. There is destructive power in the art of God as well as artistry that feeds our souls night after night in the moments before dusk. Nature is part tender lover, part terrible majesty.  Rumi reminds me where to invest time, energy and focus, “World power means nothing. Only the unsayable, jeweled inner life matters.”

Just as we had to find the fine line between forest conservation and responsible home ownership, so our outward focus must find the fine line balance between being caught up in creating our dreams on the earth and creating our “jeweled” inner sanctuary while we still have the breath it takes to do it. It’s all we can be sure of in today’s shifting world.