Thanks for this time

This Christmas 🎶 will be 🎶 a very special Christmas 🎶 for me...

I hope and believe that despite the persistent grief I am feeling (Christmastime is always a rollercoaster for me, I can feel 5 or 6 different emotions at any one time even in a non-pandemic year) I will look back on this Christmas as a very special and cozy one. The Christmas that happened in a year when the six of us hunkered down and tried our hardest to sift through our priorities so that we could be grateful that despite all we feel we have lost—most poignantly, time with extended family—we have ultimately what we cherish most, which is each other. We have not lost each other. AND even though we aren’t in the physical presence of extended family, since the pandemic began we talk and text with them literally all the time. I hate to think about the hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of people who have truly lost family and friends this year—to covid, to mental illness and suicide, to stress-induced rifts in communication, to that sad phenomenon of “covid divorces.”

It’s wild really. We are so insulated. We usually put almost all of our holiday energy into traveling, and since that’s not happening I hope we can put it into our little family, our faith, our dreams for the future, and—never to be forgotten since it’s the second great commandment—our community and our “neighbor,” whomever that might be. I loved the line from Mr. Rogers that I quoted on an earlier post that is on a loop in my brain

Love isn't a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.

That’s how I feel about my family and my “neighbor.” That’s how I feel about this year too. It is what it is and I am striving to accept it. I guess I’m just putting these thoughts out into the void to help me make sense of them. So... “goodnight dear void” (gold star if you get the reference) and thank you for being you!