My uncle used to send email missives to the family on Christmas eve. I think it’s been a few years now since the last one, but they were always a pleasure to receive. Mine won’t be quite so spiritually rooted, but it does feel good to write something tonight, after a few cookies and a glass of something. In this case eggnog.
Our new home has a lawn out front. We’re not really lawn people, so it’s growing a bit wild with the rain. I like that myself, but respect the desire for a well-tended set of houses on the street. Eventually we’ll join others who have transitioned their yards to native plants. I lean towards getting a manzanita as a centerpiece. It’s a unique tree-slash-bush that feels very California. The highly recognizable bark is a rich smooth red, and its branches twist in a way I can stare at for a while.
I wonder about which plants will survive as the climate shifts. When I get down about the loss of our natural environment, I like to comfort myself that there will always be clouds to paint the sky in a rich palette. We would have to do much much more to hurt the fundamental elements themselves. The waters will move, the earth will shift, rise, and crumble, and the wind will sweep our terrestrial landscape. I want the redwoods to survive, the sea otters, the mountain flowers, but I take a sad comfort in knowing we haven’t beaten the elements yet.
Such pontificating could be the holiday season. It could also be that Finn loves space - We’ve engaged with lots of space books, space activities, and space pajamas. Jupiter is his favorite planet, and I get lost staring at its complex surface, with all the new photos taken over the last couple decades. The grandiosity of existence sometimes swallows me up, and I feel myself disappear into a speck, a point, a mere idea lost in the sea of space. In November, the Richmond library hosted a stargazing night with the local astronomy society, and it boggles the mind what hobby telescopes can see now. I saw the rings of Saturn, awesome views of the moon, plus a few of the telescopes didn’t have eyepieces, but were instead hooked up to tablets. They were taking long exposures, and we were able to see galaxies in surprising detail, then and there.
I know I’m a short king and all, but I have this sense of disappearing in the flow of the universe. Facebook knows it. The algorithm discovered that I will watch too many reels of tornadoes, of glaciers collapsing, and extreme sports figures visible only as little splotches, descending mountainsides.
But these feelings go the other way, an awareness of my own presence. That the tiniest of my actions is like a mountain moving. It’s easy to see with my kids, but it happens with people in the store, at work, on the BART platform. With those I don’t know, it may be that much more powerful. I am bound up with my children, our lives are entwined, but with strangers, that little nudge of action turns an idea into a thread, to something solid. And that entwining passes onward.
I often let threads remain unrealized. Simple connections are left as ideas, that I mull over for minutes afterward, disappointed in myself. When I do build a connection, it feels good. To connect with one, two, or three others on that bus ride in San Francisco, it is a moment that gives me existence.
So I am grateful for this connection with you. And I’m grateful that despite the enormity of existence, we are ourselves enormous beings, burning with energy, a mark upon reality, pressing our hands into the wet pavement, even if we don’t know who sees.
May you have a blessed and peaceful holiday, with comfort, with what you need.
Until next year,
Randy