Take a deep breath. Inhale. Breathe out, slowly, letting worries escape on the drifting waves of air. Inhale again, and with a deep sigh release all that needs release.
The happy corner: Light and Music, a happy collaboration, and a lifetime's worth of collected joys.
I decorated the tree last Wednesday. In 2016 there was no tree, no decorations. I planned to go away for the holiday, but instead I got sick and bought a house. The three years before that, after my back surgery, I had a decorator do the tree, do the house, at first because I wasn't certain I could do the twisting and reaching necessary, and later because my heart wasn't in it. I just wanted Christmas to appear, as if by magic. It doesn't really work that way of course. The magic is in the making. This year this house, this corner especially, is the both the least decorated and the most magical Christmas in a long time. I sit and breathe and relax, listening to the music, looking at the glistening lights, the reflections of light and color, and my heart is at peace.
A friend helped me drag the tree up from the basement last Tuesday, for which I am quite grateful. I hauled out the stereo and set it up, flipped and fluffed and assembled the tree, and started sorting and filing CDs and LPs, which were still in slight disarray from the move. The stereo had been waiting for the cabinet ,which arrived just before Thanksgiving, but set-up was further delayed while I waited for a call from the man with the drill. I could wait no longer, so the stereo went up top, my old Talking Heads albums came out, with perhaps a brief interruption from the Ramones, and I was dancing around the house, filing, sorting, cleaning, and reconnecting with my 20-year old self, dancing around my first apartment, hanging my first ornament on my first tree, an ornament I still have by the way. Silliness reigned, and silliness is a powerful force.
Wednesday was calmer as the decorations came out. All my ornaments are on that tree. That never happened on a decorator tree, and much as I love decorator trees in other people's homes, here, I love my tree best, a mishmash accumulated over decades, rustic items mixed with glistening Radko glass, all dubbed "whimsical" by the decorator. Whimsical isn't really my term, but I have grown into it along with the implied imperfection. I love my tree, and as I decorated I listened to a mismatched clutter of music as well, my choices constrained only by the letters D and E in my sorting and cataloging project, and my varying moods and peripatetic thoughts. I danced and decorated to a mixed bag primarily consisting of soothing piano music by Debussy, the cheerful infectious pop of Raghu Dixit, the moody blues-rock of the Eels, and jazz by Eric Dolphy, complex, sometimes enervating, often energizing. Other bits and bobs found their way into the mix, a soupçon of Dvorak, Depeche Mode, Dylan and Eminem, as needed to soothe restless thoughts. Right now, I'm not sure I crave anything more than a reacquaintance with my music, all my music, and all the music yet to be discovered.
As I sat in the semi-dark late one evening, admiring the tree and hoping to knit but instead finding a cat and dog negotiating a detente on my lap, a glass of proseco in my hand and more Debussy filling the room, I realized how well this mish-mash suited me. It seems that as I've grown older I've grown more adventurous in my taste in music, more willing to be eclectic, to resist being pinned down. I'm not comfortable being decorated, curated, collected or defined, and I hope that never stops. I hope I can grow younger and more open as I grow older. I hope that I can always stop and enjoy the twinkling lights on a tree, the music in the early morning air as the wind blows gently through the leaves, a soft underpinning to the cawing of the crows, I hope I can be open to new things and, first and foremost, the joy of enjoying life, both in times of quiet and in times of company, and the importance of having fun.
The past week has been a mini-retreat, a letting-go of responsibilities and obligations, a release of psychic energy, an acknowledgement that I cannot fix what is not mine to fix. It has been a reminder that the solution is not to build walls to stop the waves, walls which will inevitably come crashing down, but to find my own center of calm, to bend, to float, and to allow the current to swirl around me on its own path, releasing it to its own destinations while simultaneously freeing myself from the burden of obligations that cannot be fulfilled. I dance, not because I am oblivious, but because I do indeed care. I dance because joy, like creativity, is a precious gift, a delicate commodity to be protected and safeguarded. Joy isn't our weakness but our strength; it doesn't stem from the absence of pain and suffering, but through it, a light in the darkness, a spark to be protected lest it be snuffed out.
