i see the stars coming out there

now we're on to the real break: two weeks at my parents'. i call it real break because i am spending even more time watching "Doctor Who" on netflix (finished Series 3 at 3 a.m. this morning), drinking red wine out of my parents' seemingly-endless wine stock, and reading fourteen things at once. (i've gone back to reading a people's history of the united states, plus the latest issue of the dramatist, plus my dad's novel.) i slowly hang ornaments on the tree and wrap the few presents i got for my family. my dad and i debate/discuss as many issues as possible from our semi-libertarian and semi-liberal viewpoints, and troubleshoot coding problems. i like being around my parents. my siblings (and sibling-in-law) will be here in a few days. it's a nice break.

but of course, i am thinking once again of advent, and what a crap job i do with it. i still want to be the kind of person who spends december meditating on the coming of Christ. who spends the days trying to imagine what it is to wait in darkness for an event with no date. an event that, when it happens, will likely go unnoticed by me and everyone i know, because it doesn't look like what we hoped for, and goes largely unadvertised. "into the darkness has come a great light" but only a few who are lucky or wise will know that the light has dawned.

it's the myth of the cave, in a way. thousands of years of silence, and how would anyone know what the voice of God sounds like? wouldn't you believe that light is just something that the shepherds made up? choruses of angels, a deity in the fragile form of an infant, stars that hang low in the sky over a stable... it sounds like madness.

i'm sort of constitutionally attracted to things that sound like madness, i guess. but all the same, if i was around when all of this was happening, i'm not sure i would notice. the universe had shifted on its hinges and opened wide, but i'm afraid that i would be... i don't know. fetching water. running a business. trying to get enough sleep.

drinking red wine and watching Doctor Who and writing a thousand stories.

i sometimes have this suspicion that the universe is shifting all the time, and we're just not paying attention. i mean, not to the extent that it did when the Word Became Flesh, perhaps. and not in an endless-creation-of-parallel-universes-through-each-choice, i've-really-been-watching-too-much-sci-fi-now sort of way either. but just... every day, someone chooses to serve something larger than themselves. or somebody decides that their own good is more important than the good of five thousand other people. or somebody realizes that their options for a life can go beyond the job that they have now, the place where they live now, the kind of person that they are now. or somebody decides that it's not worth it, that the world is ugly and broken and that they do not want to be in it anymore.

all of these individual choices change everything. the world is better or worse, more whole or broken, based on what we choose... what we love. every second, good and evil is flowing in and out of the planet. like the sunshine. like a storm.

and me? i'm in my room, listening to sufjan stevens' christmas albums and reading about socialist revolutionaries in the 1880's. i spend a lot of my time trying to figure out the best thing to do with my future, or arguing about how the world should be managed. they aren't bad things to do with my time - maybe they even have potential to lead to great good.

but the light keeps coming into the darkness. and it's not often that i remember to look up, and see.