Holidays.

The Holiday season is upon us like rigor mortis. It seethes incandescent under floorboards. It rolls up against our legs and pulls the hairs from our shins. We are torture victims after the war.

I did not purchase presents for people. I decided to print some photographs for some people, and drew small things on cards for others. Love does not need or want a price tag - nobody values anything that should be valued. Assigning a value to love makes it nothing at all. Our hearts can't handle the pressure, and love dies softly, without a sound. Our eyes closed, we wouldn't see it happening until it was already over. We mourn loudly because death comes so quietly, and never on such tiptoed steps as when love is killed by passionate greed.

The holiday season is one that parts of me love and that other parts of me hate. I hate the crass commercialism. I hate the expectation, the driving desire to let our greed and vanity overcome us. It is one thing when we buy presents for others, but it is another thing entirely when we let ourselves expect presents from others. There is a difference. It is too easy to become caught in the moral ambiguity of those two thoughts. It is too easy to not care, anymore.

What then, do I love about the holidays? Perhaps it is the opposite side of the spectrum - the holidays let us expect ourselves to do wonderful things, to help people that we would overlook on a normal day, to intervene where courage is a gilded lily. We are human and as such we are capable of everything. Good and Evil taste the same to our moral hunger and the voracious appetite that accompanies our actions. We think with our bellies and our hearts think the same way - it is no coincidence that our instinct to kill and fuck are so closely related to our instincts to eat.

It is that humanity, then, which I love so much. It is our instinct to do all of these things except those things that benefit others. We do those things because we can, because doing them makes us human. We help others because it is in that tenuous contact that we can remember what it was to be in the womb - to be one and all, to encompass the world when our heart beats.

There is no snow this year but when I look outside I can see the light falling down like frosted dew and I remember that there were years with snow, and years with you, all of you intact.

-Rich

love in an empty room