The Star That Guides Us

It’s a different kind of Christmas this year. We are in an airbnb, still living out of suitcases after leaving Vashon Island three and a half months ago. It’s the hot dry season here in the southern zone of Costa Rica, and the sky is the kind of incandescent blue that makes you want to crawl under a rock. Our christmas tree is a ragged tropical plant, mostly bare branches, a handful of sad leaves drooping from the top like an old hat. We’ve all had moments of feeling overcome with longing for conifers and snow and family, moments when our spirits droop like the leaves on our surrogate tree, but we have rallied each other up from these slumps to make the best of it. In one of our more festive moments, with Celtic fiddles jamming Christmas tunes on our speaker, Teja and Ailo scribbled pictures on paper and we cut them out and poked holes in them to hang them from the plant’s stubby, leafless branches.

I haven't wanted to celebrate these holidays. I have been swimming in a confusing multiplicity of feelings, like too many songs playing at once: soul-shivering gratitude for all we have, goose-bumpy awe for the fact that we get to be here in this gorgeous land, heart-aching sorrow for Gaza, blinding rage for the warmongers. And mixed in with all that, I am missing my dad. This moment on the calendar always blindsides me. The closer Christmas gets, the more my heart hurts. Christmas was the last time I was with my dad when he was able to look me in the eyes and talk to me. It was the winter I was twenty-six and I was in Ottawa with my family, but I was barely there—a big relationship had just ended in a rough way and my heart was broken, and I was so absorbed in my sadness over the boy I was barely present with my family. When my dad said goodbye to me in the airport his hug was different—it was the tightest he had ever held me, like he knew it was our last hug. And then he asked if I wanted to change my mind and stay, but I didn’t consider it for a minute. I was in the momentum of my twenties, an arrow hurling away from home. How I wish I had stayed. 

This time of year also makes me feel the loneliness of being a little satellite family adrift in a huge world, thousands of miles from my nearest relatives. I remember Christmases we celebrated when I was little, when our Nordic clan congregated in London at my grandfather’s embassy. All year I looked forward to galloping the gilded halls of that castle with my cousins, and climbing into my grandparents’ enormous bed, and eating toast and marmalade with my grandmother. But the best part was Christmas Eve, when we got buttoned into our fancy bunads—colorful Nordic Christmas regalia that clearly hails from reindeer tribe roots that predate all stories of Bethlehem—and grabbed each other’s hands, and danced our pagan dances, circling the huge pine crowned with a star in the ballroom. Surrounded by adoring relatives as they drunkenly bellowed Norwegian hymns and stumbled over the jumble of presents underfoot, I felt held in a way I never felt during all the months when my parents and siblings and I were marooned far from kin.

So there is sadness inside me at this time of year, but usually it is matched by happiness. I love making the holidays special for my kids, the way my parents did for me; when we decorate the house and put cookies in the oven and turn on the music and start dancing around, I can feel my ancestors dancing with us, sharing our delight as we celebrate in our patchwork way the miracle of solstice. But the joy is hard to summon this year. How do we celebrate the return of the light when fear has our world by the throat? How do we make merry knowing that while our kids light menorahs or wait for Santa to deliver presents, kids in Gaza wait for the bomb that will end their life? How does anyone celebrate at a time like this? Jesus’ hometown is in mourning. In Bethlehem, the Lutheran Church made a creche with baby Jesus wrapped in a kaffiyeh, lying in a mess of broken rock and bricks: “God is under the rubble in Gaza,” the pastor said. I have always wanted to open my heart to the pain of the world, but the pain is more intimate this time. I feel my Jewish ancestors—those killed in shooting ranges and gas chambers, and those who died of starvation and disease in the ghetto— inside me wailing no. No no no no with every beat of my heart.

I know we have to go on loving each other more fiercely than ever now, and somehow hold the magic for our own kids without forgetting about the kids who are homeless in war zones. Never has peace felt more urgent and more impossible. How to be with the horror as we celebrate the miracle? It is a paradox that pulls the heart apart. I had a wise friend who, when we went to her house to share a holiday meal, said Authentic Christmas, instead of Merry Christmas. It didn’t have the same ring to it and a part of me wanted to argue—can’t we just affirm joy this one day?— but I knew she was right.

If ever there was a time to shed superficial sentimentality and be ruthlessly real about all we are feeling, it’s now, right now, as the earth spins in her cosmic dance and turns toward the sun, because if we can’t be honest about our darkness we can’t open our hearts, and the world needs every one of us to give all the light we have now; the world needs every little candle inside us lit to shine a way out of this nightmare. When I let myself feel it all, when I open my heart and invite the world in, I feel as if I am there. As if those mothers in Gaza are my oldest friends, my dearest loves; as if their children are my kids. When I open my heart, grief is everywhere, spilling into everything. Like when my kids do watercolors and dump water on the paper and the lines dissolve and the colors become one color. Is that what happens when billions of people are crying at the same time? Will all our colors become one color? I watch my eleven year old run into the waves and imagine him running from missiles. I tuck my three year old into blankets and untangle his curls and think about mothers digging their three year olds out of rubble. I am so ready for the lines to dissolve.

Once the Holy Land was olive groves and shining rivers; now it is a concrete hell with no escape. Once the Holy Land was a garden but for generations, it has been a prison and a war zone. Now it is a preview of what the whole world will be like if we don’t end militaristic capitalism. I read something someone posted saying that the Holy Land couldn’t really be the homeland of Jewish people because if it was, they would care too much about the land to destroy it. I understand the pain beneath this perspective but I think the author has not considered the way trauma takes us out of our selves. The way unhealed trauma, repressed for generations, becomes weaponized, politicized, manipulated and manufactured on an industrial scale.

I am making a study of trauma these days and the more I learn, the more my compassion expands to include both the Palestinian child and the Israeli soldier—who is there not because they choose to be, but because service is mandatory, and because indoctrination has been thorough. And the more it dumbfounds me that those of us in possession of clear minds do not find a way to organize an intervention, for clearly the individuals in power need to be removed from the room. The only explanation I can come up with is that, despite the illusion of freedom, we are all hostages now, all trapped behind the bars of scars of collective traumas: we must liberate ourselves before we can disarm the psychopaths. Whether we are descended from survivors of genocide or settler colonists who committed or were complicit in genocide, we all carry the trauma of this history in our bodies, and with every iteration of displaced vengeance, the nervous system of our species becomes more trapped in the cycle of fight or flight. Ending war depends on healing the trauma at its root.

I wonder often when this fear began. Not with this genocide, or with the 6 million Jews killed by Hitler's army, or with the traumatizing of German soldiers in World War 1. Maybe when we cut ourselves out of nature—when a Sumerian king who wanted immortality murdered the cedar groves where the gods lived; when Gilgamesh took his axe to the forest and civilization began. Maybe this apocalyptic pattern began with Marduk’s murder of Tiamat, the mother goddess, and the shift from partnership-based culture to dominator culture—from a culture of connection to a culture of control that forbade the avenues of release our animist ancestors practiced. I have no doubt that there is a line of blood leading from that rupture in our evolution—  when we went from being reverent members of the earth’s community to considering ourselves separate and superior— to the current genocide.

But I know the real question is not what started this, but what will end it. I don’t have the answer, but maybe I have a part of the answer, and maybe you have another part and maybe, when we investigate our own depths and unearth our own gifts, we will each find a little piece of the broken heart of the world. Maybe our broken piece is a letter of forgiveness that we write someone who hurt us long ago. Maybe our broken piece is the way we show up for a stranger who needs our help. Maybe it’s a work of art we give someone who needs beauty. Maybe it’s a decision to leave a habit that makes us more closed instead of more open. Maybe in this way, little by little, we will become the miracle the world needs us to be.

May the returning light pour its gold into every crack in this world. May it show us the way out of this horror. May the sun that sees everything give us the courage to be authentic, this holiday and beyond; may the moon whose tides flow in all we feel give us the grace to be with our grief, and all the other feelings we have learned to push away. May the spark of great love inside each of us become brighter and brighter, until all our sparks together blaze the world awake. May the earth guide us beyond our judgements, until we know the other as our self. Until there is no other, there is only love, and we are arm in arm again, dancing in a circle around the world tree with our cousins, sharing traditional meals and ancestral songs, knowing there is enough for everyone, and singing our hearts out to the star that guides us home.