Happy holidays

Moonlight zooming over the pond. January 2012.

A LETTER TO SU TUNG-P’O
Almost a thousand years later
I am asking the same questions
you did the ones you kept finding
yourself returning to as though
nothing had changed except the tone
of their echo growing deeper
and what you knew of the coming
of age before you had grown old
I do not know any more now
than you did then about what you
were asking as I sit at night
above the hushed valley thinking
of you on your river that one
bright sheet of moonlight in the dream
of the waterbirds and I hear
the silence after your questions
how old are the questions tonight

– W. S. Merwin

Christmas decorations

The holly

Shall we liken Christmas to the web in a loom?  There are many weavers, who work into the pattern the experience of their lives.  When one generation goes, another comes to take up the weft where it has been dropped.  The pattern changes as the mind changes, yet never begins quite anew.  At first, we are not sure that we discern the pattern, but at last we see that, unknown to the weavers themselves, something has taken shape before our eyes, and that they have made something very beautiful, something which compels our understanding.

~ Earl W. Count, 4,000 Years of Christmas