Tag Archives: celebrating light

Cleaning House for the Holidays

savebunpostIf you have no heart for the holidays, give yourself a gift of light and space. Gentle glowing light. And nothingness, emptiness, silence. Peace.

Last year, instead of a Christmas tree to brighten the house, I bought one of those digital frames, loaded it full of my favorite photos, and put in on the counter where the lit tree used to stand. Every five seconds the frame flashed a different picture. Colors splashed all over, lighting the place up like Christmas. It worked so well in lifting my spirits that I kept it plugged in all year.

This year, to brighten the upcoming holidays, I’ve been clearing the house out top-to-bottom. I wanted home to look like a scene out of Martha Stewart Living, in holiday-less May. Only more subdued, like a meticulously appointed hotel. I wasn’t going to survive the season with my house full of stuff crushing me. It was time for a major purging.

If you were on a desert island and could only have ten things, or if you were getting buried beneath all your belongings and could keep only a fraction of them in order to breathe – what would you hold onto?

In the depths of sixteen years’ accumulation, I came across countless photos and precious possessions from my daughter who died. Soccer balls. Stuffed animals. Costumes I’d sewn for the kids and myself. My old tent and sleeping bag. Maps of France. Assorted remnants of my past lives. I found fifteen electronic candles and ten forgotten flameless LED tea lights.

The hardest things to let go were the stuffed animals. The squishy-soft polyester puppies and bunnies had glinting plastic eyes that followed me around the house as my helper and I gathered a step-van’s worth of papers, defunct electronics, kitchenware, old luggage, toys, teaching materials, art supplies, and house parts. “Someone else is gonna love this,” I kept reminding myself, as I tossed things in bags.

I saved the battery-operated candles, the photos, a cape of pink polka-dot tutu fabric, a bunny garden ornament and six stuffed rabbits. The tea lights. And when the two days of purging were over, when the house was silent and still, I sighed with relief at the almost bare shelves. Something in my soul sang out and danced in the empty spaces as I filled them with electronic light.

 

What do you do when you’ve had your fill of holidays? What do you hold onto in this season? What do you toss?


REPLY TO ROBIN

Moon Watching

Robin Botie of Ithaca, New York, photoshops a full moon with flowers to celebrate the Full Flower Moon and Mother's Moon and Mars at opposition.

Bright light poured into the bedroom when I awoke in my mother’s house in the middle of the night. Street-lamps. Their white radiance puddled on car tops and on the newly paved street. I tiptoed from window to window, peeking beyond the glowing. The sky was a thick mass of clouds, as it had been most of the day.

“I wish we could see the moon, we’re missing the moon,” I’d announced before bedtime.

“May’s Full Moon was called the Full Flower Moon as well as Mother’s Moon,” according to The Old Farmer’s Almanac. They’d promised a Full Flower Moon for Saturday night. A Mother’s Moon. How perfect that I was visiting my mother. Waiting for weeks in anticipation, I’d known it wouldn’t look any different from other moons. Farmer’s Almanac uses colorful Colonial and Native American names to track the moons in changing seasons. May marks a time of warming, blooming, increasing fertility. Bare trees were finally budding. Wild violets and fresh white trilliums dotted the slopes off woodland trails. The gray winter was really over.

For me, any light in May, even a street-lamp, is something to celebrate.

A Flower Moon. It was also a Blue Moon, the third full moon in a season of four full moons. And Mars was at its brightest and closest point to Earth in more than a decade. But Saturday night there was not even a hint of Mars, or the moon, in that dark sky.

Sometimes it’s the hardest thing to have faith that there will be light, that summer will come again, that there will ever be another beautiful bright time. But then, there are things that leave no doubts in my mind: I can’t always see the moon, but it is out there, somewhere. I can’t see my daughter who died, but I believe she is out there. Somewhere. Watching the moon. Watching me.

And somehow, through long winters and many moonless nights, a small light inside me stays aglow with hope.

 

What does a full moon mean to you?

 

REPLY TO ROBIN