(and 🎵 still...)

Warm wishes of the season, to you and to all you love.

Around here, family celebration launched the midweek holiday early over the weekend.

As the Jungians say, here’s a little of the shadow and light on this oh-so-stuffy household at the lake…

These snapshots depict variations on familiar themes. Wish-lists from Grand Miz E were a savvy continuation from our nearly month-long, hurricane-driven time together earlier in the fall.

Along with a super-deluxe kit for journaling in both words and artwork, topping her Tishie-list were “special clothes for improvisational dancing and song.” For the latter she got special clear garment bags (pictured at center) with pockets for shoes and accessories.

Worth noting, the fourth of her chosen dance outfits, a teal favorite with matching ballet shoes, isn’t pictured. She deemed it insufficiently modest without her flesh-colored leotard.

(This unsolicited judgment call from her had her dad smiling so much, he’s unlikely to need other gifts this Christmas or all year long…)

🔵

The midweek holiday timing, plus the Christmas season with the newly occupied part-time Charlotte condo, also unexpectedly expanded holiday-celebration for the grownups. That now spans family lake time and city for dining, enjoying some tours of light displays. Also now possible are cherished Christmas Eve church services, which can be hard logistically during big gatherings in the suburbs “on the actual eves and days.”

In the latter regard, it’s difficult to describe or match music, spirit and phenomenally delivered message of candlelight communion services at another exemplary, progressive Charlotte church with which I’m fortunate to have friends and special ties: Myers Park United Methodist. (It’s another one not far from the condo!)

Before his now decades-long senior pastorate there, the Rev. Dr. James Howell (pictured) led our Davidson United Methodist Church as senior pastor. For several years I worked in lay leadership there, on long-range planning plus strategic & crisis-management communications in the years before big churches had paid staff professionals for such stuff. (In more recent years I try, with limited success, to do more service and volunteer work that’s not always just like my day-jobs have been!)

🔵

As always, best moments at this soulful-darkness time of year tend to arrive when pulled to inner stillness and reflection.

With more than a little irony, often those moments are evoked and animated by very big voices…

“Still, still, still (… the night is cold and chill…”)

Seasonal spirit arrives with more full force for me some years than in others. In either case the Mormons’ big-choir voices don’t fail to deliver it. (My preference is the older, more classical sacred-music versions like this piece, not the made-for-TV-special ones full of glitz and overlays.)

So again I recommend a simple, treasured song, with the one pictured my preferred, nearly a cappella, version. (This sampling from Spotify and illustration of the album should help for browsing wherever/however you get music.)

(Do be aware, in this beautiful rendition, the “stillness” is only up to about 4:20 minutes, after which it transitions to louder, more raucous medley.)

At Solstice time, this always somehow points — a little counter-intuitively — to how the light is already returning, the days growing longer… even as we speak. Um, sing.

🎄

And, that is all I have for now.

🦋💙 tish

… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”

*If the Spotify links above have timed-out, you can redo a search on your own. My apologies for the inconvenience, if so.