It's Christmas Time, Once Again.

The Christmas holiday is here again, and we are once more bombarded by a seemingly infinite number of media messages exhorting us to buy, buy, buy. I will spare you the obvious comparisons of what the holiday has become to what it is supposed to be about – that’s been done elsewhere, in many ways, and sometimes quite well. Certainly, Christmas has changed, and there is always a rerun of “It’s A Wonderful Life” or “Miracle on 34^th Street” to remind us of that.

I remember when my now adult children were actually children, back when Christmas presents were the big deal. As a single father, living in near poverty, I nonetheless took a rare $1,000 Christmas bonus and spent it all on my kids. I bought the latest and greatest of whatever they had their hearts set on, as much as I could, without going into massive debt. The joy on their faces was worth whatever temporary relief I might have had from paying off an extra bill, or buying steak instead of hamburger. Besides, when things are tight, it’s important that kids feel like everything is okay, even when it’s not. Dishonest? Maybe... I called it ‘damage control.’ And it felt more like Christmas.

Now they are all adults, and Christmas has changed. We’ve done a ‘secret Santa’ single gift exchange for years, keeping costs down for all of us as our family expands with new spouses, grandchildren, etc. We’d draw a person’s name from the hat on Thanksgiving, and spend no more than $100 total on that person, whether it was on one single gift or five. It was fun, saved us money, and we all enjoyed sitting around and enjoying the joy and surprise of each person, in turn, opening their goodies. Smiles... laughter... a few tears, even. Felt more like Christmas.

Last year, we broke some new ground, thanks to my son’s wife, Julie. She suggested that we each donate the money we would have spent on someone’s ‘stuff’ and donate it to a charity that person would want to support. We all drew names, then contacted our person later to find out which causes they supported, and which organizations they favored for us to give to. We looked into the suggested charities, made our choice, and donated the money in that person’s name.

On Christmas day, we gathered as usual, but we had no packages in our hands... just a single envelope from each of us. We sat around after the meal, opened the envelopes, and each talked in turn about why we felt connected to the particular charity we had chosen, the values they cherished, and the importance of the love and compassion behind the worldly actions. This father was gifted with the sight of his adult children each expressing why they felt certain charities were important, and what inside of them connected to what that particular charity did. There were smiles... laughter... a few tears, even.

This year, we’re adopting a project of two of Julie’s friends, who are going to help rebuild infrastructure in a small village in Sri Lanka that been decimated by civil war... schools, health care facilities, houses. They will carry our small wad of collected funds to aid in the effort, and even though it’s just a drop in the bucket compared to what is needed, great and powerful oceans of change are composed of many tiny drops in many, many tiny buckets. We’ll sit around together after our Christmas meal and talk, and share. We’ll enjoy each other’s company, and feel joy that we have this bit of time together amidst the demanding rush of the material dross. We’ll enjoy the young grandchildren, eyes sparkling, full of happy noise, and feel the magical presence of life being renewed once again, unending, bringing the promise of better people, better choices, better outcomes than what we see today. We’ll feel hope, compassion, and love. And gratitude. Always gratitude. Feels more like Christmas all the time.

Man In The Mirror

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PivWY9wn5ps

Every once in a while, I remember to watch this old music video again... “Man In The Mirror,” by the gone but certainly not forgotten Michael Jackson. The song, by itself, is excellent – an emotional and articulate call to look at ourselves and make the changes within that we wish to see made manifest in the world. What makes the video so moving is the juxtaposition of historical images that capture so clearly the conflicting emotions we all struggle with... fear and anger, love and compassion, baseness and nobility. No one is immune from this human predicament; no one is above the fray, no matter how we try to remove ourselves. We all feel all these things, even if we do not express them, or even admit to ourselves that we do. The various levels of human consciousness, or, if you will, the various evolutionary pieces of our brain, dictate that these feelings will forever exist within us, in conflict.

So what do we do?

An answer, I believe, lies in the model of the human being put forth by an Indonesian spiritual leader, Muhammed Subuh Sumohadiwijojo, or “Bapak,” as far back as the 1930’s... he envisioned the human being as composed of Life Forces, starting with the Material, then Vegetable, then Animal, then what he called Ordinary Human and finally True Human. Without going into great detail, I’ve found this hierarchy, or ‘layering’ of forces to be instructive in looking at what part of me is making choices, or reacting to a given situation. Each choice or situation then teaches me about myself, slowly, over time, with my errors being as valuable as my successes.

Bapak had a great saying, which I have remembered for many years... “Are you sitting on the chair, or is the chair sitting on you?” In other words, who is in charge? Is it you, the True, or Noble Human Being, making choices, or is it something lesser – a lust for the material thing, a desire for too much pleasure and comfort, a desire to dominate, be right, or ‘win’ that is making the call? The True Human, I have come to see, (a little) makes choices from a place above these others, quietly, from a perspective unavailable to the other ‘lower’ forces.

This perspective cannot be taught, for the mind – a material thing, after all – cannot hold it. It is not a ‘learned behavior,’ in an educational sense of the word. There is no degree in it, nor is there a course of study available at any university to teach a person how to become a True Human Being. The school we are all enrolled in is this world, and unfortunately, most of us have become too entranced, too enamored with our distractions to hear the Teacher’s voice. We stop going to class. We forget our homework. We drop out. The Man In The Mirror’s image becomes blurred, out of focus... and sometimes, the mirror even breaks, leaving us truly shattered in every sense of the word.

I suspect we come back to this amazing and terrifying school, over and over, lifetime after lifetime, until we graduate, until we understand who we are and what we’ve been given. I am more conscious every day of the incredible gift of this life, and of the opportunity it affords me to ‘make that change’ that will make choices from a quieter, more Human place. I still see myself affected by all the forces – the chair sits on me still – but at least I can occasionally see when it does and laugh at my foolishness. Condemnation is pointless... forgiveness of self and others the homework for the day. The Teacher is so patient, loving us all, for we are only human... and then, just barely, sometimes.

Enough for now. Time to go to school.

The Paths of the Heart and Mind

The paths the heart and mind travel when left untended can be both strange and revealing. I was Googling a location, trying to find out where I’d be filming the next day. The map opens up to the entire United States, and there I see, tucked away carefully near the east coast, right where it’s always been, the state of Pennsylvania. I zoom in, find Williamsport, my father’s old hometown, and suddenly my need to find the filming location evaporates. I find the town, type in his old address, and find myself floating, as it were, over the home he lived in where he grew up so many years ago. I remove the street names to just see house and trees, and remember the shape of his house and the back yard with the giant pine tree (now gone) and it’s little garage.

Memories suddenly flow through me like water, a flood of images, sounds, smells, feelings... waking up at 4:00 AM to go fishing with my Dad, the time I stayed there with my grandma right after my week at Boy Scout Camp, the taste of salt on a fresh cantaloupe, fooling around with some neighbor kids for hours as a hot summer’s evening wandered to a close, the chirping of the crickets that grew like a symphony, the mustiness of the garage that held hundreds of my grandmother’s dusty antique collection, the solemn ticking and sonorous gong of the little clock on the mantle, the memory of scraping my elbow raw sliding down a ramp on my bike... My God, I realized... it was all still there, somewhere within. All of it.

I have thought of none of these things for many, many years, but clearly, they all lie complete but hidden, waiting to be called up by some mysterious mechanism, some fantastical device that stores every impression we gather during our time here on this orb. Nothing is lost, though much is consciously unrecalled through lack of use of the neural pathways. Doctors doing brain surgery discovered that the oldest of memories could be completely recalled by touching areas of the brain with a cryonic probe... not just details of what happened, but the sounds, the smells, the sensations. The human being, it seems, is a fairly unique, highly accurate recording device that is always on.

To what end? From an evolutionary point of view, how does this serve us as a species? It doesn’t. Not really. Oh sure, having a concept of ‘the past’ gives us an advantage that allows us to build on a series of successes or failures that over time culminate in what we call ‘civilization,’ but the results of this particular experiment aren’t in yet. The ability to store such precise sensory data isn’t necessary to create a civilization so much as abilities like refraining from killing each other off, creating and using tools, communicating effectively, working together for common purpose, etc. Remembering what the subway station smelled like at 59^th St. when I was 10 isn’t one of those critical pieces of information upon which hangs the future of our species. But it’s there, nonetheless, tucked away between the feeling of buying my first comic book and the salty taste of the 5 cent pretzels sold by the little vendor outside PS 152 in Brooklyn after the winter weather broke up and the spring crocus poked up in my front yard. Then there was the coal chute that...

The present calls. Like some time-traveling Superman, I swoop up from 1950’s Pennsylvania, leaving the pleasant valleys, trout streams, gentle, rounded hills smoky with mist in the early morning sunrise, and memories of another, more innocent time – and tap in the address of the film location. Time to go to work. An interesting experience, this. I’ll always remember it.