Nothing to Redeem

At its source, the holiday season is a celebration of giving and forgiving, an honoring of the heart’s qualities of love, compassion, understanding, connection, appreciation, and light.

The season can also energize a keener awareness of life’s sharp edges and amplify feelings of separation, brokenheartedness, alienation, disillusionment, frustration, and darkness.

These are not the feelings generally represented in Christmas cards to usher in this hopeful time of year.  Yet they are here in abundance, a part of life. Explained away as misinterpretations, bypassed as less real, or just avoided and ignored because they don’t feel good.

Embodied life is certainly a dance of opposites, all of which exist within an unbounded transcendent field of awareness expressing itself as the full range of the human/divine experience. Contracted feelings are not outside of this dynamic. They are not the result of a mistake. As difficult as they are to speak and be with, these feelings offer the opportunity for us to receive even the most challenging circumstance.

This receiving evolves as it moves from mind to heart to unite finite circumstance with infinite nature. Holding both creates a poignancy of feeling that signals a deeper incarnation of light and love into our selves and our world. This dynamic is possible because of the diversity of this earthly plane, not in spite of it, and is a gateway to being here as love.