I’ve always put up a Christmas tree. Despite the halfhearted participation (and groaning) of my boyfriends, I’ve faithfully, right after Thanksgiving, headed out and bought (or here on Vashon, cut down) a tree to lug home. It’s a ritual I rarely miss.

After visiting India some years ago I returned home in the winter and the notion of putting a bauble-laden tree on display felt absurd. This is a rite of passage for anyone who ventures to India: Your brain cells are rearranged and you never view your world, or its customs, the same. I know that was true for me as a Westerner. Christmas in America, after the dust and squalor of India, felt gluttonous. So I skipped the holidays that year — though I missed having a tree in the house.

I enjoy the act of arranging the colors, textures and lights on a tree. It’s similar to making a painting, the alchemy of conjuring art. Simpler, but no less magical. I especially love the ricochetting of light amidst the ornaments, as it envelops the tree at nighttime. As I’ve grown older I’ve come to understand that the ritual of displaying a tree is a sacred act — although I’ve never fully understood why.

Most of us are familiar with the historical origins of the Christmas tree. Its association with the pagan rite of celebrating the solstice. When the light of the Sun ‘returns’ in the Northern hemisphere and begins its increase and ascent, the radiance grows stronger and longer through the ensuing months. Trees would be displayed to honor the burgeoning of light and life. And the fruits and trinkets that would decorate the tree honored the bounty, the wish of a successful harvest in the year to come.

And yet the historical perspective never impressed me much. I mean, none of those facts would drift through my mind as I’d lounge on the couch in the evening — no matter my age — and stare at the tree until I fell asleep. Nope, another set of mysterious associations would encircle me and send me into a reverie. And it wasn’t until I came to the conclusion of one of my favorite books this year that I began to make sense of my devotion.

Martha Heyneman‘s book The Breathing Cathedral is a fantastic interweaving of the cosmologies of Gurdjieff, Dante, Aquinas, Stephen Hawking and others, into a new model, a new interpretation of the universe we inhabit. I was drawn to the book because, as a longtime student of Gurdjieff’s teachings, I was intrigued to see how Heyneman, a zoology student turned poet, was bringing Gurdjieff’s teachings forward and marrying them to the world of science.

The last chapter of her book is titled O Christmas Tree, and at first the subject — the family Christmas tree — seemed an odd way to summarize all that she’d explored in the previous chapters. But in the end I understood completely. Read more

“All things, all places, are sacraments to which we pay the reverence of complete awareness. With that attention, a universal resonance comes forth from all around us, and this universality, the sense of oneness — glimpsed only through close attention to the present moment, moment after moment — is the simple, great secret of existence.” — Peter Matthiessen
 
I’ll be taking some time off from Astro Inquiry for the next few days to join family and friends in what I’ve come, each year, to call the “Holidaze Bardo.” (A bardo is a Tibetan term used to describe various post-death phases, but also to designate times when our usual way of life becomes suspended.)

In reference to the quote from Peter Matthiessen, it’s my true wish that each of you take advantage of the next five weeks to reaffirm and reconnect to the simple, ordinary wonder of your existence; your loved ones’ existence and to the existence of life’s myriad forms — including the existence of the sweet angelic being we call ‘Earth’ that — along with the Sun — supports and sustains each of us.

In the spirit of giving thanks, I’d like to particularly say ‘thank you’ to my peers in the astrological community, both colleagues and clients; and my own teachers and fellow students. And to each of you that visit and support this site and my work and efforts for more ‘complete awareness.’

As my teacher said to me once: “What else is there to do in life but focus on soul work?” Of course there is conventional work, pleasures and leisures, relationship and camaraderie — he wasn’t diminishing the stature of those happenings, but he was addressing priority, for happenings mean little if there is no one truly present, awake, to experience them.

Carl Jung once noted: “…until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” And that might be fine — a fated path for an unexamined life — but one’s true Fate (in the Gurdjieffian sense) is when essence is fully illuminated; lived and worked in service to the all. Then being replaces doing and there is the simple freedom to simply be. That’s a true respite.

Love,

Frederick
 
Photograph: Silvers Welch Road View by Oldoinyo

Astroinquiry.com is on a temporary hiatus and will begin republishing and journaling (maybe) shortly.

Thank you and love,

Frederick

“Midsummer is the sexiest time of year. The word itself conjures images of luscious fruit, eternal twilight, warm nights dotted with the firefly’s peridot lights and feverish days punctuated by bursts of thunder and warm rain. It is a time when romance wanders freely in the mind, and when the bounties of earth are so plentiful, they are intoxicating. Life seems to spring eternal.”

“The green of the trees begins to take on a darker, more exhausted verdancy, animals go about the business of rearing their growing young, instead of birthing them and the nights and hottest days are filled with the gnawing presence of insects. Lammas, or Lughnasadh (pronounced: loo-NAH-sah), the sabbath which celebrates the beginning of the harvest year, is a time of maturity and of age. It is also a surreal moment in the year when death and life coexist in physical manifestation.”

—Genevieve Salerno.