The Miracle of Sufficiency

On September 4 of this soon-to-die year of 2009, I lost my mother to leukemia. It has been a good while since I last posted anything. As I muddle through the passage as best as one can and through this tunnel of winter, it feels as though one is somehow giving birth to herself. The process is not always easy, more often painful.
On Christmas Eve, perhaps for the first time in my life, I was completely content to be at home, alone, not needing, not seeking anything, working at the bead table, and to know that my own sons, for whom cakes were rising in the oven, filling the apartment with the most wonderful smells to be shared on Christmas day together, are their own, great persons, and that this is a good life. I was serenely delighted to not have gone out shopping in a desperate frenzy of spending. I was humbled and grateful to have reached this place. "This must be the way Joseph and Mary felt that night in Bethlehem," I mused. "There they were on the road, in the vortex of a collectively superimposed taxonomy of values, really, preparing to go up and be counted for the census, for tax purposes, with this great, external, societal onus upon them, and a spiritual new life within, about to enter the world, and all they needed was a place to be...ok." A simple thought, of course, but splendid: the miracle of sufficiency.
Similarly, drawing from Hebrew lore derived from another archetypal, very human experience of this same, deadshort-day, dark time of year, Hannukkah is considered by many Jewish people to be the celebration of the Maccabees' guerilla-warfare led defeat of the Syrians and the celebration of the rededication of the Temple of Jerusalem after its defilement by Antiochus. Yet it seems to me that the true celebration lies not in the outcome of war, for war is really not at all a salutiferous event, but in the strange and awesome occurrence beheld afterward as a shining example of the miracle of sufficiency: the scant amount of oil that the Jewish people managed to forage to rekindle the holy flame at the altar (symbolizing the connection between the human and the divine--the gift of life) somehow proved to be enough to burn for eight days and nights or until more oil was brought to ensure the tenability of the flame, ostensibly, forever. It seems no accident that at this same time the metaphoric struggle to preserve light and life occurs it is at the time of the winter solstice. The message is so clear: Peace lies not in the realm of thought, nor in hopes for greater things. I fold my arms about me, as angels fold their wings. Merry Christmas. Happy Hannukkah. Happy Holidays, wherever you are, and joy to all.