Christmas Tapes Playing (the conditioning kind)

[Guest guest]

Dearest, Beloved Friends,

Kid that I am at heart, last night we put our Christmas tree up and we

drug out all the various ornaments. Unlike most ornaments, ours are

collectively a menagerie of little stuffed critter-friends. There’s

Minky the monkey, (of Saturday Night fame) Mark the otter, (of

Yuuummm & Ndhighlight fame) Ganeshey the elephant, (of folklore and

finance fame) See-All the seal, (of Omniscience fame) Mr. Wizard the

Magic lizard, (of cartoons and Tooter the Turtle fame) and I shan’t

ramble on about the monikers of the Christmas Khidr kids that hang on

our tree through the wet with Love season before us now. (Not that

it’s not always that season, eh?) What I’m really wanting to share is

the memory evoked from looking at the white, artificial Christmas tree

twinkling with blue lights, shimmering with pearl nacre-colored

tinsels strands and dandling on its dandy-branchy knees, all the

little friends in Hymn with the Friend to send me this childhood

memory that had remained buried, until the moment it presented. The

memory:

As a young child I was giddy-happy when the holidays came and I have

adored the Christmas season more passionately than I can say from day

one. And I really mean day one. I was born on the 29th of December

when bright lights are still swaying, saying, “Hey! Woo! Ahhh! But

without any words or concepts of this thing, they were imbedded in my

memory-banks. Ahhh, feed me banks of light, Mr. Stipe!

In this fondness for bright lights and Christmas colors and people

still in their joyousness, presents intact, Love still going S.W.A.K,

and the New Years Eve celebrations but a breath away, I also must have

imbedded the intimacies of the minds of others, perhaps…maybe. I’ve

always been a crazy Bhakti-Baby. Their bliss and joy and excitement

caught on fire in my mind and in my heart. Now, I’ll depart from even

further digression. (It is my obsession you know, to drone oh

so…Homerly.)

My favorite Aunt, aunt Lila Belle, the one with whom I stayed when I

was too ill as a child to play with other children, she had the most

beautiful, awe-inspiring Christmas tree that I ever put eyes towards.

It was a huge, fat pine flocked white (apparently a big thing in the

fifties and early sixties) and decorated with shiny blue glass balls,

blue twinkling lights and reams of “Angel hair.” The Angel hair ( a

white, shiny, hair-like thing in swathes) glinted with the reflecting

blue lights and the blue balls reflected and everything that was

reflecting was filling my little heart with immense joy, great

pleasure and endlessly growing delightedness. I would sit near that

glowing Christmas tree, that Luminous Guha in Blue Krishna-colored

charm and just go gone, go blue light and bright true mind into

timelessness and peacefulness. And then one day something happened

that changed everything. The Voice of the Parent-God in

ultra-conditioning reverb –

I was sitting amusing myself with the happiness that had taken me,

being amused in the Happiness that became me, when I happened to

catch a snatch of a conversation between my Granny (Mettie, my

father’s mother) and another Aunt, Aunt Betty. (Who happened to have

several small children herself in tow.)

The conversation went something like this:

Granny: Betty, don’t you let them there children near that Christmas

tree! Why Lila Belle, she’s pert near put poison under that thing!

That stuff, that white stuff she calls Angel hair, well I heared

it’ll kill a fella if’n he wert ta swallow it…

Betty: Swallow it? Why would anyone ever swallow it, and why’s it poisonous?

Granny: It’s made a something called fiberglass. If’n you was ta tech

it, ta git it on yer hands, it’d stick and when ya teched yer mouth

er et a leg off’n a that turkey she’s got cookin’ in thar, it’d git

in yer throat and then in yer belly and you’d die bleedin’, shredded

like these rug strips yer lookin’ at. It ain’t perty to say, but it’d

be a whole lot uglier ta be a seeing it.

Betty: My Gawd, Mettie! I had no idea! What is Lila thinking, knowing

we have all these little ones running around? ( I had something like

a dozen cousins near my age) I’m going right in there and telling my

children to STAY AWAY FROM THAT DEADLY CHRISTMAS TREE! I hope

someone’s watching Mazie, you know how she sits practically on top of

that thing…

And there it was. I was conditioned by fear from that moment on. I

became frightened to get within a dozen feet from that tree of

beautiful, bright, blue and white death. And I didn’t even know what

death was! Yet I was frightened to my atoms by it and the idea that

they had pandered to my young and impressionable mind.

In my entire life, I have never ever put angel hair on my Christmas

tree. Even in the various department stores, it was always a slight

cringing, and for a reason I did not understand that rang loudly as a

certainty of “Don’t buy this, don’t handle this.” So I didn’t. And

then there was last night. The last night that an old fear could

continue its smear campaign against a shiny white angel kind of

thing. (Do they even still make it and sell it?)

 

~ Our Christmas tree here in Carlotta

The thing is this: Watch what you say around young children. They take

us literally and they hold what we say as what it is, even when it

isn’t. One last little note to this Christmas memory story –

 

~ Evelyn holding Grace ( I bet her shoes aren't white!)

When my daughter Evelyn was about eleven or twelve years old, she had

bought herself a new pair of shoes, her choice and her money. When

she came out wearing them, proud and peacock stancing, I was struck

with the hilarity of it. They were big, white shiny patent leather

shoes that made her feet look as if she were wearing clown shoes. Oh

God, here’s the part when we have to tsk tsk and say, “what was I

theeenking?!?” …

 

I said to her, “Why didn’t you just wear the boxes?” My Heart, that

Beautiful, vulnerable child ran from the room crying, devastated. I

could have gone right into the ground and never came up. But it was

too late. The bullet-words I had so carelessly shot forth as supposed

“humor” had struck her a fatal blow of conditioning. I talked with

Evelyn about this a few days ago. She said that to this day, she will

not wear white shoes. Oh the sting of words that pierce through time

and space and place the ones’ we Love face to face with that old

“Conditioning Place” of pain most profound! Oh! To be as harmless as

the Great Harmlessness!

 

Like Siddartha did when he faced himself, saying so surely, so

Sweetly, “Oh Lord of my ego, you are pure illusion. You do not exist!

The earth shall be my Witness,” may we all let fall the frame-up we’ve

bade welcome to our personaically-powdered world and let go and let

go……………

Let go of the past.

 

~ photo courtesy of b

LoveAlways,Mazie Is there a gadget-lover on your gift list? MSN

Shopping has lined up some good bets