Festival of Lights

My friend’s house burned down Christmas morning. Not down, but in. Nonetheless, I feel terrible. While she was pulling her special papers out of the smoke, the firefighters wheeling up her drive, I was on a raft in the Opryland Hotel with my daughters and niece, looking at overfed catfish.

There is that guilt. The kind that people tell me I am crazy for feeling. What could I have done? It wasn’t my fault. But it’s not that. It is the fact that I am safe and warm while people suffer in tsunamis and Katrina and I don’t do enough to help. It is in my DNA to feel this way. That is why my first adult career was a Christian missionary (more about that later). I was told there were people “without hope, without faith,” and when I got there, thought “Crap, where did you get this hope and this faith? They said you were all out.”

I had been handed something to deliver to people that would solve problems and offer help. Of course I was devastated to find it wasn’t true, that the people from the land of diabetes and mortgages had little to offer those whose religion predated mine and left them smiling as they lived in thatched houses.

So when there is something that I can do that is tangible, help someone who just lost their belongings, it becomes sort of an emotional emergency for me. It is my need, more than theirs that drives me.

Recently scientists have found that there is a “God gene”, a prewired place in us that makes many of us “sure” there is higher power. There is discussion that maybe the gene is the transmitter. God to gene to us. But what if the gene is God? No middleman? What if that is all there is to it? Right there in us? Maybe some genes are more attune, more developed, swollen perhaps. Maybe some are suppressed or have been overridden by the sex gene or the alcohol one.

It would explain why I feel more at home with the God that is in my head than the one in the church. And it would explain why I feel a compulsion to give something and do something when people suffer. I can’t help it. It’s in my wiring. So, scientifically, it has been proven that this compulsion to help has nothing to do with being a “good person.” It is just fate. I have red hair, brown eyes and a swollen God gene. Lord, help me.

My Holiday Letter

I spent today in bed until two. Then an hour bath, a little reading and writing. Basically hiding out after a stressful week.

The end of the year and the holidays always get me going. Then before I know it--the New Year. Add my birthday on that and a dose of PMS and I am emotional and introspective. Most of my time is spent living in my head having fake arguments or loving conversations with people I barely know. I would say I am going crazy, but it is pretty par for the course for me. Fortunately this mood is also short-lived, usually followed by an energetic streak where I accomplish everything I have put off for the last few weeks.

It doesn’t help that I got one of those “This is what I did this year” letters. I am not morally opposed to these letters as I like to know what people have been up to. But as I read them I think, well, what I have I been up to? What would I put in a letter and send someone? The trips? School news? What the kids are doing? Would that make people know me better? Was that what my year was about? (see, I told you I was introspective)

Here’s my year for you:
I became disillusioned with my government, large and local. Boo.
I learned to shun friends that were toxic. Yay.
I have begun to thicken around the middle. Boo.
I’ve gained some spiritual insight into myself. Yay.
I am becoming bored with where I live(see Christmas Parade snapshot above). Boo.
Suddenly material things have dropped significantly in their importance. Yay.
The material things I am attracted to are shiny and sparkly. Boo.
I am spending more time alone. Yay and Boo.


Frankly, when I look at the events of this past year there have been some hard times in my family. Yet, when I look at the impact they have made on me, it’s all good. There is some deep energy I get from struggles, something I miss in those good years. Also, there is some type of thought process that occurs in my creative mind when there is stress all around me. It is as if I go further down in myself to hide and unearth all these truths I can use in my writing or living.

It’s not that things were so bad this year and man have I suffered. The opposite. It has been a good year. A different type of year. Probably what the girls will refer to, in decades from now, as their innocence.