Alchemic Verse

It’s been a bit since I wrote last – anything at all, even to myself. People often refer to losing momentum as a function of the holiday season, everything being so ‘busy.’ The adjective I might use instead is ‘loud.’ Every man-made object in and out of the home has a screen that is shouting at you to consume, strobing glossy imagery of ways to buy joy. This holiday season, give your loved ones [us] the gift [money for] of happiness [whatever we peddle].

I fully admit that this is a cynical take, a view I hold in grand contradiction – I actually love giving gifts and Xmas is my favorite holiday. The chance to provide someone a thoughtful symbol of appreciation is one I try to never miss, and Christmas lights revive the child in me often bereft of innocent and nostalgic magic. I even have a favorite Christmas movie, The Muppet Christmas Carol, to which I know every line and song by heart.

Nonetheless, the assailing of ritualized carol-regurgitation old and reworked from every device capable of producing sound, the scores of hired [or AI-generated] expectant rosy-cheeked faces gleefully imploring consumerist cheer flashing brightly when one looks anywhere but the sky, and the narratives meant to encourage spending to ward off your deepest insecurities or fill the voids in life-satisfaction are overstimulating and grow a sense of urgent exhaustion.

From that urgent exhaustion, a halt and quiet reflection become compulsory. I’ve come home again for the holidays, both for a level of practicality and a desire for comfort; the latter I admit has not been terribly forthcoming, and the former does not encourage any particular level of cheer. So it is.

I sit again in my old bedroom, the space slowly being cleared of forgotten relics, misplaced memories, and dust-covered wreckage of yore. Some of the artwork has been stored, several shelves cleared, the armoire emptied of old costumes, linens swapped to put to use the stored remnants of my sold house. I choose to feel the full gravity of each item that leaves, donating what may bring another good use or joy and discarding the detritus. In this way, each piece of my past is honored for its former place before letting it go.

Life Yeet 2025 wraps at the bedrock of what was, a grand shattering of feeling trapped, stagnant, silent – like I’d chosen to follow someone else’s dreams to a result that while wonderful for someone else, did not suit me. From the first ‘well, shit’ on my deck under the azure glow of the moon to now, so much has fallen away, and not without a tremendous amount of grieving and goodbye. I mourned each piece of the tower, catching each in the full impact of its terminal velocity, honoring its former place before letting it fall to the earth. Beloved and beleaguered, shelter and shackle, comfort and crutch.

What remains in the clearing and demolition and all I have learned is perpetual.

Exhausted and overstimulated though I may be, I remain grateful for all that I have, a conscious effort never to take any of it for granted – the food on my table, abundance/work that has allowed me to find a new way to live; a warm, dry bed to sleep in, the clothes on my back, the clean water I drink, the clean air that I breathe, my sweet dog, music and writing, nature’s beauty, the people in my life and love in its various forms and expressions; my health, my mind, safety, freedom. All of this comprises the foundation of opportunity and then some, to learn, to grow, to build, to connect and to experience.

The space clearing effort extends to The Attic, to a likely-temporary but eagerly equipped home music studio in the making, while I review the fundamentals of music theory long latent in the memories of a child who, compressed by criticism and pressure, never wanted to practice her violin, or piano, or sing, or perform on command at the holidays for insistent relations, even though she moved, emoted, and thought in the language of music. She is being gently coaxed out of silence, one of several ways that Life Yeet 2025 will from the bedrock be built new – Life Creation 2026: The Reincarnation.

And so, in the words of good old Ebenezer himself, my favorite version of the words of course being tearfully delivered by the earnest-among-puppets Sir Michael Caine, “I, I will honor Christmas, and try to keep it all the year! I will live my life in the past, the present, and the future. I will not shut out the lessons the spirits have taught me!”