(Originally posted on Livejournal – mirrored to: https://calum.dreamwidth.org/214470.html )
The real problem is, people think life is a ladder, and it’s really a wheel
Pad Cadigan, in “Johnny Come Home”
Our Xmas tree is a signpost, that marks out the dark of the year for us. It always has to be up before the longest night – and we used to leave it up till we went back to work. Around 12 nights, signalling that time of rest and reflection, spending time with friends and family. Each year we add something else to it, marking time. Some of those things are personal to us, some of them remind us of others.
The year Sarah was dying in hospital, I couldn’t bring myself to take it down when it was time to go back to work. It was heartening to come home after visiting her and find the lights shining. So, it stayed up, until we took it down the day after she died.
Now, it always stays up till then. That bike ride I mentioned in my last post, that marks the end of the dark winter festival for me. I go ride with Sarah, come home, turn the tree off for the last time.. and the next day, we take it down.
It’s just one signpost that marks time, one cycle. It interacts with other cycles – before Xmas I was in Vancouver wrapping up a project. Now I’m in Vancouver starting another. It’s not the end of one ladder and the beginning of another – it’s just a notch on a spinning wheel, whose teeth intersect with other spinning wheels, all turning interlinked but at differing speeds.
It’s our intention and will that gives many wheels the energy to turn. If we put negative energy in, it slowly spreads from wheel to wheel, and things start to slow down, or even jam. But positive energy turns much more than the wheel its applied to.
I don’t want my thoughts at this time of the year to be chipping cogs off wheels – I want them to be like the Xmas tree, spreading light and hope long after it’s put away in the box.
For those that didn’t know her, this is what I wrote after she died: https://www.skirnir.com/seolta/sarah/
All my posts about Sarah are saved here now: https://www.skirnir.com/seolta/