It is like this every year, isn't it, honey?

The end of the year closes in on us, as it does every year. I have had my usual holiday overwhelm from too much food and people and am now in a sort of half-retreat, studying plant medicine and walking in the meadows. However, this year I did not have the health crisis I did last year! Hooray! I have eaten no sugar for one year and I made it through Christmas in Germany without eating sugar, cow milk, gluten and pork.

At first, I had no intention of making cookies, not having eaten them for a year, but then about a week before Christmas I gave in and made Buckwheat gingerbread men, thank you to the fabulous simply sugar and gluten free website. And I made chocolate covered toasted almond haystacks with orange peel and cardamom and little balls of yumminess out of honey marzipan rolled with a mix  of dates, raisins, and apricots, spices, and cocoa. Yum. And my dear friends and family went along and cooked only things I can eat. So there was no sugar hangover and no weight gain and no having to say, i am sorry but I cannot eat that. What a relief. And I received as a belated birthday present from my beloved parents who came to visit for 12 days, a Kitchen-aid! Hooray! Now I can cook, bake, and later make ice cream from coconut milk once I buy the ice cream bowl. Life is good.

And I had my usual Christmas religious/spiritual confusion and Great Doubt, as it is called in Buddhism. After growing up the first 9 years of my life with no church of any kind and a secular Christmas, and then the next 7 years with weekly church visits (which I never found meaningful and would sit in the back of the church using sign language to talk with my friends) and then the years of my early twenties where I explored religion, spirituality and mysticism, practicing yoga, reading Joseph Campbell, moving to Santa Fe and finally moving into a Buddhist Center, it is all rather jumbled up. (Oh and we still had a secular Christmas complete with tree and presents in the Buddhist Center!) So, every year when Christmas comes around, the secular celebrations of feasting together and giving gifts, and the returning of the light as the days grow longer, still hold meaning for me. But I never know what to do with the religious overlay/underlay with the whole thing and end up feeling very confused why I celebrate anything in the first place on the 25th, because that doesn't have any spiritual meaning for me. There is always an underlying level of restlessness and questioning around this that doesn't have the time in stillness and meditation or walking in the forests that it needs to be with because of all of the cooking, shopping, eating etcetera.

But more will have to wait, because the sun is now shining for the first time in weeks there is a blue sky and I have to go out into it because it is truly the return of life at this latitude!
I promise, I'll write more soon.