My Christmas

I dreamt that I was walking through the pathways of my life, passing by the years standing like trees along the track. Backwards I searched through valleys, and sometimes upon a height I saw my way stretched out, the long forgotten pattern of my life across the land. And I looked for the seed of me, to see why I had grown such as I had. Why love or fear or think such as I do.

And yes, there in the pattern of my strength’s footsteps I found the crevasses, the fallen trunks across my way, even the delights which drew me on or changed my onward questing of the years. Yes, I found too the seed of me left in my mother’s shy eager strength by my fathers longing for her love. I saw in the seed the faces of who my mother loved in secret, and who my father drew with him into her arms. Yet that was not my Christmas, for in the very centre of the seed, in the midst of their longing and secret loves and fears stood Life.

Suddenly my way fled beyond the trees, further yet than their roots, higher than their growing tips or dead branches; deeper than time I went into the dream of my Christmas. And I stood with tears before love – love in the very kernel of my seed, which had at my conception laid bare the treasures in the sperm and ovum of my start; led their tiny selves to risk their death and burst asunder in flagrant giving to become me. Love which led my mother to grow beyond herself in my nativity, and my father to care beyond his personal need to raise me; the love which readies every parent hearing it to die for their young.

And I was Christmas, the birth of love into the world and the tragedy and beauty of human life. I was eternal love frightened of dying, life itself uncertain; God doubting God’s existence. And if I am the miraculous anxious about my value, struggling to pay bills, and at odds with myself, such is the wonder of me, such were my tears before love – before myself.

My Christmas was the beginning of time; the beginning seers call the Creator and scientists name the Big Bang. But my heart sang its own story in which the Explosion and the Creator were One; where the Explosion had life, and the One was my parent. For I, in the way of dreams, was that ONE, which had died out of loneliness to become many – to be you and me and the stars. For one can never be other than single – and that great explosion rippling into our multiplicity was its willing death that we might be.

That was the dream of my Christmas.

Copyright ©2001 Tony Crisp