Or Perhaps It's The Christmas

That glow. You know. That fireside. That family. That time with. That laidback. That time within time that seems a leetle timeless. A leetle bit of timelessness imported into this streaming roaring hooting moony starry spinning merry-go-round of time. Or embedded in it. Or implicit in it. Like the center of all turning. This bit of stasis in the rush. This spot of time. This eye of time. This time’s eye at the end of the year in which one lives for a week or so, maybe. If fortunate. If blessed. As though one had literally. All of eternity. Right here. Right around oneself like a fog of light. A cloud of light. To move around in. To relax in. And it is.

How to say it. Something suffused. Something pregnant with. Oh. Let’s call it this sense that. What one has. All that one has. One wants to. Well. Give it away. Clear out the attic. Clear out the basement. Clear out the drive. Blow away all of the snow and all of the money and all of the stuff. And relax in this. Remain in this. Bask like a buoyant whale in sun on the surface of a wide calm sea. A blue and black and green and wine-dark and red and yellow and golden and silver and bronze and steel and chrome. An infinitely extensive sea.

A sea that almost seems the universe itself. That seems the one verse itself. A sea in which all that is needful is a sayer to say what it is singing. To translate this great wide color and shape and manner and movement and stasis and light and dark and. And. And. Into words one may hope to have a language for. Into language that may contain something of what the thing itself may be. Into something one might say to someone else in this high season that may. Oh. Who knows. That may strike.

That may travel direct. Past the outer defenses. Past the suburban battlements of another. Into the inner City. Into the inner park of the heart with its fountain. Its ever running artesian fountain. In the intimate public park of the heart, with its fountain running there. Ever. Summer and winter. Bubbling up. Forced up out of the stone of the world and into this public pool. This rugged, delicate water. Sweet. Unaccountably sweet. Here in the City. The inner City of the other.

Which is astonishingly open this time of year. Open to the public. Available for enjoyment. Accessible for inspection. Cleared of the renovation activities. The preservation and conservation crews and their equipment. And the anti-terrorist barricades and men with body armor and machine guns and helmets and so forth. Cleared of all these. And now open once again to the others. That they might enjoy. Might come upon and rest here. Sitting beside the fountain. Watching the light move in it. Through it. Listen to the subtle sound of it that seems. Oh. The sound one heard at the beginning of the world.

And it is perhaps also something that. Something that is. Something that seems out of the ordinary eternity of the season. Something that seems to burn here at the heart of all this. That happens. That one is shown but. One has no idea why. Why one has been chosen. For this. To see this. To be blessed and burdened with such a thing.

But here. In the house of one’s brother. Here on the night in question. On the night of God’s birth. On the anniversary night of his entry into the rapid flesh of the world. Here in the living room with one’s family scattered randomly all around. One’s parents and one’s brothers and their families and one’s sister and one’s wife and at least one of one’s own children. Scattered like so many leaves. So many grass-like leaves. All around in several rooms. And this room dark. And a movie playing on the leetle home theater doohickey. A movie about evil. But about evil that isn’t all that bad. That is a leetle silly in fact. A little bit of a nuisance in fact. That is overcome by everyday heroics. Quotidian almost. Ho-hum. Naturally supernatural acts. That are. Well part of the repertoire. If you will. Part of every really good guy’s bag of tricks. Every good pirate’s bag of sword tricks. And word tricks. And sailing tricks. And money tricks. And. But I digress.

So as we’re watching this movie. This entertainment. This simulacrum. This miniature. There appears in the darkened Christmas tree. Lights turned out to enhance the entertainment pleasure. In this dark tree. A light. A light like a light-filled fog. Like a phosphorescent light shining out of the water of the sea. A cloud of light that is all along the trunk and extending outward from the trunk nearly touching the tips of the branches. All the way up and down the tree. That in fact fills the tree with light. That remains in the tree for. Oh. Maybe three quarters of an hour to an hour. Dwindling all the while. Starting out bright and full and strong. And then retreating toward the trunk. Shrinking from the trunk ends and branch tips. All the while. Until it finally. At a time when I’ve looked away. Disappears.

And as one experiences this. As this supernatural event is happening. One wonders, well. One wonders. Is. Or could. Or would. Or how. One says to oneself. Oh. This is literally happening, isn’t it. This. This metaphor is literally occurring. Here. Here in my presence. In this life right here. This place where. Oh. We have a. We have the. Oh. I don’t know. In this world right here. God. Isn’t it. Isn’t it. Oh. God. Ho. Ho.

One is a leetle giddy. One doesn’t mind admitting. One is a leetle silly. Light-headed, if you will. Feeling a leetle. Ho. A bit of. Well off-balance. What with. Well. This light here. This white light with a bit of gold and silver shimmering in it. This cloud of light that is. Whew. That seems. Well. A real beauty of an unworldly light. A real strange. A real odd. God light. At the heart here tonight. Of maybe. Of certainly. This extraordinary. This ordinary. This supernatural. This natural. This created. This written. This storied. This figurative and literal, dark-bright and bright-dark, timely and untimely, turning and unturning, material and immaterial, sensical and nonsensical, prosaic and lyrical, eternal and temporal, actual and imaginary, conditioned and unconditioned, artificial and thoroughly real world.