The Christmas tree is up.  Red gingham ribbon replaced by a sheer green and gold one.  It looks nice.  I sit in my chair (by the heater vent) hot cider and book in hand.  Can't help but love the sight.  Slowly relaxing, my roommate slides into the piano seat and begins a song.  Three songs later I close my eyes and feel shoulders lower.  My favorite song of her repitore flows off the keys.  While not a Christmas song the melody tangles around me in gold.  My worn quilt Mother made back in Jr High has batting showing through.  I've never gotten around to "fixing" it.  I'm sure the same fabric resides in her chest of drawers down the office hall.  I can see the hallway looking down at it.  Fell the cold floor and chill of Christmas Eve's.  Talking of us children determined to stay up all night and sneak upstairs for a peak.  Granted, we're all older, that doesn't make a dent in some of our traditions. 

I ventured outside in the dark and cold yesterday to listen to Sheri Dew.  There is something about how she presents, talks, that reaches me in whys other's don't.  I comment to a friend that I think the way she talks.  The stories have enough truth that I feel how I felt when that occured to me in a similar situation.  My yearnings for hearth and home echo back in the affirmations from accross the pulpit.  Each time I listen I want to press pause and savor the Spirit of the place.  Of my place there.  Where God reaches down and touches my calmed center.  To many times the chair is to cold, or my attention wavered.  Here, though, it is all gone.  Focus is there.  This is what it must be like to be so in tune nothing else matters.  My odd form of meditation in the midst of a fireside.  How odd.

Yet it is this place that I look out from and see.  My sister and her new husband.  My brother walking the same way I did at his age.  My neices and nephews surrounded by the best people I know and love.  My parents.  These wonderfully flawed people that I love.  The ones who taught me to love, teach me to sigh, and cause me to cry in joy and pain.  These are the ones I want the best for.  Who I know want the best for me.  Even when they idiotically think for a moment that if I change this way or that for whatever reason, I'll be happier, complete.  We love each other, and what else is love for?  For, as an unknown person once said,

"Love sees more, not less
But because it sees more
It is willing to see less."

It is so hard to see more, and be willing to understand how to let the less grow into more when it comes to our siblings.  Amunition from years pass ask to be through.  Perhaps as we see the next generation grow the patience we didn't have for each other grows.  We begin to realize these creatures we've known all our lives are actually people.  Adults with feelings, valid by the tendure innocents left into our care by a Father who has always seen us for who we are. Even, as Dad always reminds me, better that I know myself. 

Thanks, Dad.

Both of you, for that lesson in love and small glimpses into what I am, and what, therefore, others are.d