YOUR CHRISTMAS ARRIVAL - George Viney

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Okay, folks, nothing to see or read here. Keep on scrolling. Carry on with your day or night as the case may be. There is no need to start up only to stop with a "what-the-frick is this?" in the face of seeming endlessness suddenly found here in a place of finger-swiping text-brevity and internet shorthand written with highly trained emoji-throwing ninja-thumbs. 

There is no necessity to read this unexpected "the Spirit moved me" book-length commentary turkey-stuffed into an enormously unusual pre-amble and ever-ambling preface-post to a surprisingly shorter poem. Yes, folks, keep it moving, just pass on by with ease and free of incubating contemplation. Getting your heart moved actually anchors it in the depths. No! Let your sails fill, let your sale-sighting masterful lookout up there on your mast amid the billowing sails look for actual sales, and get the damn ship-ment on your time-is-money ship affectionately known as "The Productivity" to bring content-ment to the people! Yes, just move on, people, shorter is better in the long run, and reading should be brief so that you can read it in your briefs before you get dressed and drowsily jump into your shipshape car! 

Hey, don't block the way, son! Hey, you, yes you smoking the JUUL and coughing! Yes you! Step aside, son, you're creating a vapid and vaporous roadblock on the information superhighway and it could affect your health! 

Come on, folks, you ain't got all day! Feed on your feed: all these hors d'oeuvres that tickle with empty calories and an occasional opinion-salmonella! Focus, man! 

Scan for the photos and memes: seasonal sugar and peppermint curly and candied canes that can help you and me get through the day with these stark red-and-white niceties that will fluff the evening's pillows, avoid the blues, and help us let go of the day's laborious residues without our buddy Benadryl, that will allow the back-breaking ginormous candy-boulder to liberatingly roll all the way back down with such numbing sweetness before the morning bottoms out and we once again commence to heaving and pushing its tiring and titanic saccharine-weight back into our fitbitting and excessively-measuring marathon of a race back up the goal-achieving molehill-now-immovable-mountain once more...Unless...

Unless you feel called to, soul-smell, tastebud intuit, this heart-brewing, word-dripping, aromatic and imported deep-flavored soul-coffee with an inspiring intimation of special and exotic spices-of-life brought in from afar by crowned ones from the Orienting within each of us who long foresaw and now know the true Christmas mood and evoke its magic...

One double espresso; no, better stated,...expresso; no, better said: One lyrical and lingering LENTO, in an Italian-made coffee cup with a little mischievous elf-figure stamped underneath the cup as well as on the underside of its now flying saucer, just for you! Because you paused and didn't mind waiting, because something, a feeling, a Someone perhaps, is leading you to follow the never-ending and meandering way the Magi have been traveling...Yes, this post is long...but it took the Magi years to make their way to that little town of Bethlehem so may that thought both comfort and encourage you and soften this hump of the just-conjured Christmas camel your rump is now riding on while you read Spirit-signs along with the Magi on the winding path of serendipitously-strewing words!

Let our café-conversation begin while delicate Christmas music plays in the background...Hey, listen, that's O' Holy Night! I love those words: "Til He appeared and the soul felt its worth!" When He approaches, in us, before another in front of us, even within us, even in the past or the future, or mingled in the thousand-and-one things of the world, the SOUL in the Other feels its worth! He appears and lends His sight to our eyes! The casual, and the world's endless casualties of feeling, become transfigured and holy! Incense begins to enter from behind the heart's red-velvet curtains, playing with these little candleflames on fifty flickering little votive candles sparking prayerful petitions in a little burnished brass votive candle stand in this most unusual little Evanston café of memory and friendship!

Synchronicity authorizes our conversation, these reflections, and our detaining drinking of this darker, richer coffee of musing metaphors! Our coffee beans are not the common beens! They are coffee beings awakening us with luxurious Christmas anticipation! Listen to that song lilting through the nooks and crannies of this four-chambered-soul of a cafe! Right there! Those lines:

A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices

For yonder breaks a new glorious morn

Fall on your knees

O hear the angels’ voices

O night divine

--

As a psychologist, my calling is to care for the logos, or speech, of the psyche. In that place in which matter rises and Spirit descends, the psyche appears as feeling-images, a sacred realm of images, memory, mingling and creating memorial imagination in which the above and below meet, in which the Divine and the human, the timelessly Archetypal and our temporal humanity, intimately touch. The literal, every literal thing, every literal person, place, creature and object, suddenly radiate as loving luminous sacred images, animated and animating, Spirit-shining uniquenesses that speak and mean within the tabernacle of our witnessing hearts: this happens when we enter this realm of soul, so long lost within the Cartesian split into merely mind/body, spirit/matter. The third, the middle term and the reality partaking of both and within and in between both which is the soul or psyche has been discarded. We have lost the speech of the soul outside of personal explanations and interpersonal dynamics; the soul, registering and imagining, feeling and perceiving, knowing the personal and glimpsing personally and uniquely from the inside of experience, has been cut off from humanity and the immense regions of cosmic inner space full of divine heavenly bodies of imagination, then replaced with the exclusiveness of objectivity. Subjects now by and large merely externally observe lifeless objects and measure them by external measurements. 

The symbol, the metaphor, have become mere fancy, now viewed as simply made up, unverifiable objects of unprovable faith. Yet, the psyche speaks still, brings us her images each night in our dreams, speaks the poetic language of creating images, infused with deep feeling, soaked in a loving intelligence beyond anything the ego owns and claims. In the psyche, genies ever-await in bottles, in bottled-up emotions, billowing, arising, and revealing if we would but polish our soul-lamps with genuine feeling-love and open-hearted imagination once more!

And when we do, we become Magi setting out, following Soul-Stars, hoping to find the birth of the Divine which can heal us and give us meaning! And now, anything I write, and the poem that follows, begin to reveal, unveil, the sacred and approaching Presence, the deeply-feeling and loving presence, that abides in our silences, in the coolness of wintry and cloudless star-filled nights, in the silence that remains when a loved one passes away before us, in the silence that gathers and holds and encourages us so tenderly and quietly in every fragile and tentative beginning, and in the silence that becomes palpable in this season, in the approaching and beautiful grace descending upon us during these holy days.

Yet time speeds up, the exquisite melancholy that opens our wounded hearts to love and beauty get trampled on and buried under the clamor of the day, the frenzied rush of the getting, the doing, and the buying. The necessary blackness, the approaching of the Winter's Equinox when the day is its darkest, stops speaking soulfully to our need for the birth of hope, the return of loving kindness, and the need to slow down, incubate and hibernate and recognize all this love and holiness in each other and all around us! We are left with no soul-blackness, we no longer see in the dark and accustom our eyes to the glorious night sky like we did as children peering through a telescope on a wooden tripod! We no longer see in the darkest moments of our lives what, who, starts to approach, shimmer, bring soul gifts, soul joy, and soul meaning! We are just left with Black Friday and competitive grasping and credit card hangovers, egged on for more and bigger, our eggnog no longer spiked with Higher Spirits that awaken us to the heady rush of approaching love. 

We race so fast in our mundanity that we race right past all these faces we adore, all these precious loved ones in our lives, grab and give to them fast-gotten gifts, so often never pausing to really open our feelings and realize we are all here right now, alive and living in the same time, at the same time, together! Our loved ones, all these blessings, all this beauty in so much around us, are not seen, truly seen; we literally see them, but the soul of each thing, each moment, and each other is barely touched. Touching each other at a deep, soulful, and vulnerable level is so incredibly hard! And it is now so difficult and distant from us; so we fill in with addictive action, accelerated busy-ness, and casual, surface chit-chat. No judgment: so much is going on, so much hatred, so many others and groups to defend against, so much misunderstanding, too much polarization! This is all too much for so many! Our North Pole, once imagined as a sacred, secret place of gift-making, earthy and wild gift-giving and person-witnessing, is now over-heating into this endless polarizing that is part and Amazon parcel of all this climate change! 

Remember when you were a child, when this season, these holy days, were full of imagination, innocence, warmth? There is a deep, exquisite, beautiful "mood" that appears in our feeling if we can slow down, attune, and open to what was once so accessible to folk life, felt in common human experience, experienced within genuine community, before electricity and mechanization, before Descartes and objectification. Nature all around was alive and felt. Spiritual presences were palpably experienced and not dismissed or denigrated as hallucinations. There is a Christmas "mood" of such tender and precious, delicate and intimate feeling available, but now it is so much harder to contact and approach. 

What does the soul or psyche experience in the story of Christmas? Let us leave the literal and the historical, the purely spiritual and the rigidly fundamental: let us stick to the images of this lovely and powerful story. What does it mean that a Holy consciousness, baby-like and vulnerable, is born in darkness, finding no place in the mainstream and status-full and status-quo-ed, and remarkably to be found not in where our egos expect, but in an overlooked and disregarded place within us, beyond brands and social influencers and entertainment and money and celebrity, in a mangy manger where the animals are? We go for stability instead of into the stable of our heart where the animals know, take us back to our instincts, connect us to our earthy depths, those depths where the spirit is seeded, germinates, and gracefully grows into view. We need to follow what lights up our lives, raise our heads and look beyond and past these low florescent ceilings of petty and short-sighted thought, gaze into the awe-some heavenly vault of endless mysterious expanse and twinkling, of endless mysterious matters we are ever discovering, usually by imagining! 

The animals lean in close, offer their warmth, and with the fullness of their feeling, they attune and listen. The Magi journey onward, without maps of knowing, only the illuminating intimations of life-transforming arrival which will change and transform everything! They carry gifts of gold, ever the symbol of the most valued, and spices that reveal themselves in the longing and the burning of all that matters to us into what can reach the invisibles, the Sacred Ones, the Godhead, those that lived before us, those that have left us and are no longer, and those who are quietly forming their stories to manifest after us. Essence, scent, and smell: all from the same word roots. Our soul's nose smells what is of great value and presence to and in the soul! 

When we become sheeple, following the latest opinion, abiding within what is "heard" in the herd all around us, what our groups find acceptable for us to think and feel and act for us to be accepted, we need to find our shepherd-heart again, the one who is humble and open and beautifully wise enough to recognize an angel when one appears, when a sacred annunciation is occurring, when joyful news can lead us out of sheepish ways and find what gives each us, each unique person, a genuine, felt, and meaningfully experienced sense of purpose and calling. Our heart, shep-hearing along with shepherding, follows the story-message unfolding upon glorious angel's wings! Words can be winged, can lift us, heal us, awaken us, call us, when they stop being mere robots of practicality, efficiency, and the technical. Angels appear to us and bring us joy when they escape the cages of exclusive rationality and the domination of deaf power, when they are released from being ever-sentenced in horizontal sentences, and leap into flight as stunning, revelatory, annunciating Word! The Angelic is poetic! 

In the beginning was the Word, the Logos, and now, in the Christmas season, the Word is renewed, being born again to light us up with hope, meaning, purpose, and this vitalizing connection with the Divine!

And here in the darkness, when the soul is blinded, when the heart is mutilated and maimed, when humans, and places, and animals, and climates, and our very world are all bludgeoned with violent stupidity, are poisoned with forked-tongue heart-zombied lies parading as truth, are gripped by ego-possessions of power, are scapegoated through projection of our own darkness onto others, and turned into excessive  and harsh judgment which is devoid of love because our hearts have been neutered of feeling, and our souls have been sliced from spirit, from body, and the sacred feeling-imagination that connects them; there arises in the stillness of the night, in the out-of-the-way stable, in the earthy manger of the animal-feeling hearth-now-heart, in the common cloth that was once so-feeling-woven by loving hands now wrapping and containing this newly-arising life so exposed to such darkness and all these viral views and such infectious groupthink. Here now, smiling at us is a consciousness so infinitely connected, so profoundly loving, so incomprehensibly generous, forgiving, and wise! We join the Magi, the shepherds, the animals, and we kneel...

We are all always possibly approaching such a momentous happening, such a marvelous epiphany, such a healing and hope-renewing baby-presence who, if we approach this arrival humbly and with genuine attunement and reverence, Mary and Joseph will watch over us, soul-parent us, accept us into this nativity, this holy-feeling of family, and invite us into this intimate and incredible, yet ever-invisible and so subtly quiet celebration. On the outside, the still coolness of the wintry night; the deep moaning and comforting sounds and the beating heart-warmth of the animals; the homey containment of wood and hay; the shimmering, flickering starlight streaming and falling like snowflakes upon us; and the sound of passersby who have no idea what is happening; but on the inside, inside the soul of all this, and us, there is such music, such festivities, such a celebration!

Well, just listen...listen with your childlike heart and your singing, imagining soul and your winging spirit...here approaches Your Christmas Arrival...

And the music lingers lightly on the season’s sacred mood in this little interior café of soul and friendship:

O night when Christ was born

O night divine o night

O night divine…

--

Now we leave off from our conversation, the animal-bodies know timing! I step away to go to the café's restroom...to rest and experience writing-outpouring relief...while you step outside to feel the refreshing...slap...on your face by the laughing and elfish brisk winter-wind.

When you are ready, I would love for you to join me in the little stable of this poem below...

Your Christmas arrival

"I AM has sent me to you."

                                                          -Exodus, 3:14                                     

I see you quietly walking over hill, through vale, 

following an unusual and startling star,

dressed in gold and purple robes,

bearing secret gifts only for those with eyes to hear, 

hearts to see,

or souls opened through the sacred wound: 

those born with He who descended 

into smallness 

so that we could become 

great enough to bear the Divine 

here! Now! Hear!

Here-now-heart!

Although it is night, and I see no smoke, 

the smell of your jasmine incense 

dances into my nose-palace, the other one 

with the two gates 

for the coming and going of invisible guests:

Essences who have burned free from ego-sticks 

carefully cured and prepared.

There is a baby ever-arriving, 

though the measuring world, forever grasping,

grasps it not. 

The enormity of this moment!

—His Arrival! This world's increasing need!—

form a Red Cross 

rising out of white bloodstained-bandages

at the crossroads 

of my own in-forming wound

and the wounding-world's Roman-piercing:

this burial sight,

this third eye that really hears you,

this third ear that profoundly sees

this Christmas so quietly approaching,

the sound of so many unwitnessed souls 

ever-so-faintly giving up...

Hope falls like snowflakes...

and those in need, 

cracked open in humility,

turn with childlike wonder 

and look up,

stop their wrong sort of dying,

and become incense-prayer!

From the future, 

I hear His Wordssound 

like thunder!

Resound 

in silence...

Land 

like fresh rain: 

"Lazarus! Come forth!"

From within this stench-of-death-filled-minetomb,

inhale-gasps He-whom-Jesus-loved

burst-reaching this surface once more

with lungs breathing no longer

what is found here;

with heart now beating what was poured

from the Sacred Chalice 

out of that Other Place;

with bowels now vowel-moving 

what truly feeds the Spirit

and makes the soul;

with re-Called mind-fullness that now re-members 

that One Birth

that One Time

into this History

which created,

in-augured,

the winged, double-snaked,

double-faced,

wand-erring

Doorway 

ever-streaming 

the Now-Alive Divine

who ever-surrenders 

so that Love 

may re-place Us

to this I-Thou Center everywhere,

to this all-circumferencing-embrace nowhere fixed,

once so sadly surrounded

by impoverished, harsh sentences

and imprisoned without Us

within us.

The Word swirls and gathers in the mouth-cave

readying for this Entrance,

instantaneous and entrancing utterance spoken

fully—I AM!—into this appearance

heal-radiating, 

eros-bonding,

soul-initiating,

into this miraculousizing that Is

becoming—marvelous poiesis!—manifesting 

in Who is not said 

explainly

within these words!

Lovely Friend,

You who have paid the highest price,

offered Your life,

only with the most ex-pensive effort

in us

will you re-turn to You

and whirl like Stardust-Rumi

and join this Speaking!

With verb-eyes of precious opal 

peering through our leaden fissures,

—mummypoem-bandages loosed!—

the whole world is stirring awake

and Rising!

I turn to greet you in joy

as You, Dear Friend,

arrive

—just in Time!—

to witness what, Who, is taking place

as our Guest,

as our Host,

right now, this Once,

this intimacy,

us together, 

Three and One,

within our Beloved Fourth

who bears and births

this Annunciating-friendship,

this live-enunciation!

His Birth, the Friend's awakening, this love

within our intimate conversation:

Angel-poem hear-appears to sheepheards

lovingly close

and closely surrounded 

by all these beautiful 

wool-warm word-animals

braying all together on my solitary-heart's hillside

and, so gently, with such exquisite and delicate feeling,

Announces, 

amidst our winter's silent forming-and-falling 

crystallizing grace

Your Christmas arrival.