Christmas Morning. And I’m all alone . . .

Actually no. I’m all one. It used to be that I lived in the world. Now, as another crone put it, the world lives in me. YES! That’s what 71 years under your belt does to/for you! Such an abundance of memory and joy!

Son Colin and I were going to travel to Boston to be with his brother Sean and family, starting this morning, but plans have been delayed due to quickly changing Garden Tower negotiations to manufacture the towers. Now we plan to leave on Friday, or Saturday, but who knows? I remain both expectant and poised for change, ready to pivot at a moment’s notice.

Meanwhile, this morning, puppy Shadow and I took our walk through town at 8 AM, and literally, “not a creature was stirring” for the first two miles. Not even a car down 3rd Street, normally a busy road! Nothing! Finally saw one car, then two more, altogether, and all at a distance. Plus one woman running her dog, again at a distance.

Truly, Christmas is a very special time in our culture. Hard to fathom. I wonder, does it have a special frequency detectable in outer space?

This Christmas is especially special. Right now, in fact, the Moon is hitting 2° Libra, starting to move in on the extremely tense and volatile and r/evolutionary Uranus/Pluto square, now configured with Sun, Mercury, Mars and Jupiter. So all hell’s likely to break loose somewhere, especially for today and the next week. (Which is why I suggested that we remain in a mood of meditation during the ten days following Winter Solstice).

Here’s the chart for right now:

With fully seven out of ten planets triggering the Uranus/Pluto volatility, it’s a terrific time to break loose (Uranus in Aries) of old patterns (Mercury/Sun/Pluto in Capricorn) in family (Jupiter in Cancer) and relationship (Moon/Mars in Libra).

Got it? Take off those conceptual helmets and shake out your hair. Whatever beliefs, judgments, attitudes have been stuck for years, or lifetimes or centuries, let them go! Look straight through them to the infinite spaciousness that holds us all-one! Realize that your stuck stupid pattern has held you in a vice-grip that you can simply shake off, shimmy out of! No big deal, during this Uranus/Pluto breakthrough time.

On my walk this morning, I was looking around at all the empty university buildings, dorms, rental homes, everybody skedaddeled elsewhere — to their families, I presume, dealing with, letting go of these old patterns?

Of course, our solitary walk reminds me of the fact that I am not with loved ones on this Christmas Day. When was the last time that happened? Has it ever happened? I don’t think so!

Here we are, the first four us (there would be four more), on one fine Christmas Day, at the home of friends, early on. I’m the oldest, sitting next to Mom.

Here’s our beloved cabin, near Ketchum, Idaho where all of our Christmas reunions were held, from 1965 on —

until the folks moved to Seattle when they were in their ’70s. So many of their kids had moved there, that they decided to pack up and go.

Now the cabin has been transmogrified beyond recognition by successive owners, and Dad is dead this past sixteen months; and nine months ago siblings Kris and John accompanied our 95-year-old Mom on her final journey, her desire to live out the rest of her days not in the state-of-the-art nursing home where she had been ensconced, but “in a family that loves me,” she said, very clearly, rising up out of her dementia to do so. Dear daughter Paula in Baton Rouge agreed, with love and joy, to take her in. All of us visit, about one per month. And now Kathy and her husband Marty are moving from Seattle back to the Ketchum area. So another diaspora appears to be slowly unfolding. . .

Meanwhile, memories. Of that cabin, and how, when our stern Dad agreed the next day to honor his slightly drunken New Year’s Eve promise to allow my then-husband (Colin and Sean’s Dad), a Harvard student architect, to design and build a cabin for the family in the summer of 1965, and how that design and construction actually took place! Patrick created a beautiful, light-filled building that held all of us easily (the two buildings on the left are bunk houses), and featured a glorious two story sunken living room with enormous lava rock fireplace that overlooked the confluence of the East Fork and the Wood River. Really an astonishing architectural/cultural transformation for my family, which until that point had been ’50s typical, living in a big ranch house in Twin Falls. Once the cabin was built, we all loved it so much that the family moved there full-time.

And as a result of the dramatic spaces created by Patrick’s beautiful design, we ended up doing theatrical events in that living room. Every Christmas, we’d make up a “Christmas Cantata” for the folks, all eight of us, each sibling creating a song of his or her own to basically sing about life that past year, and of course, a chorus, or refrain, in between individual songs. Lots of us are musical, so guitar and piano joined our four-part harmony voices. We’d practice out of the folks’ hearing (not easy in that cabin; we’d go up to the small attic room in the main structure and close the trap door to downstairs) once a day for about a week. Then the big moment came, the evening when we’d present that year’s Cantata to the folks: the aim was to make them laugh and make them cry. And it always worked! Those cantatas were recorded on cassettes. Where are they? Did they survive all the moves?

Here’s Mark, playing, with Paula and her kids, when they were young, nearby.