RETICENCE & ROMANCE  
[The Reminder] 

Every year, we hold onto traditions we have nurtured since childhood, to ease us into a holiday season that promises we will see all of our dreams come true ... if only we can believe in the gift and spirit of it, Christmas .... children seem to know instinctively how to do this - to embrace the unknown in a way that allows them to believe with all of their heart and souls in Santa Claus and flying reindeer and elves who know their names by heart and precisely what it is that they truly seek in secret ...

I am reminded this morning of Romance … how it always seems to find its way in the Fall, when harvest colors abound in glorious gold and auburn leaves, and new seasons  yield to a watercolor delight on every limb, beckoning rebirth and something new in the air, something clean and whimsical … yet profoundly passionate and romantic … faith perhaps?  In all things possible?  Whatever the feeling, it is transfixing and magical … 

It calls up memories, too of the home I loved once and left a long time ago in New England, tucked off a Massachusetts highway in a bed of pines.  A loft with open skylights dressed in pastel colors and a wood burning stove that staved off loneliness in those isolated winters when family and friends were  2000 miles away on a gulf west  coast.  It took a long time to get settled there, off of the Atlantic, but in time it grew to be my only home.  Customs and traditions were so different in the northeast, in both language and ways of relating, but I learned to acclimate as we always do, when we are called upon to learn, and grow, transition through circumstances and evolve ..

We never know going in though, exactly what will be expected of us, do we?  Or how it is we will be transformed by the experience … but sense, all the same, the need … to be there, present and accounted for, alive.    The holidays bring it out in us .. this tendency to romanticize where we have been, what we miss, how connected we were in truth, once, to our traditional and family roots.   We want what others want.  Need what others need.   All of us sensing the urgency to be loved at times.   Wrapped in a blanket of it, warmed by the smell of it, cleansed by the fire of it … Love.   In every color of the rainbow, arc of the flame, brush on canvas, we are passionate beings, wanting romance and love in our lives.  And so, we gravitate toward the memory again … do all in our power to make it so, this time of year, Love. 

Alone for so long now, I don’t know how to permit my heart to waken to this resounding music in my soul, but from a motel window, see fall blooming before me in autumn hues, and imagine the feelings alive again.   Imagine romance anew again.   Feel tingle on skin, when passionate leanings awaken again to love’s influence in the air.   And know to the last breath in me, that I must push through the reticence and remember again … what it feels like to be alive ….   

 Magic & Miracles [The Magi]   2006