this time of year

busy time of year. and i (mostly) love it!
yesterday was winter solstice. celebrating the return of the light. i thought about it all day, what it really means to celebrate that in my outer and inner life. such a beautiful, quiet celebration. i had a candle burning all evening, welcoming the light.

tomorrow is sena's birthday! she'll be 4 years old. wow, i'm just about blown away by that. repeating what was already said to me so many times: where has the time gone?
well, it's definitely been an amazing, rich, fulfilling, beautiful 4 years of my life. i can't write about this w/o getting emotional...
i feel like it's been a true blessing, a real gift to be able to share in someone else's life and to be able to get as close to a person as i have with sena and aiyana.

tomorrow we have a party, and sena's been soooo excited about it for the past month. she's been keeping track of how much time left till the day, and she's been planning it to the last detail. her vision of the party was quite different that what i would've envisioned, to put it mildly, but it's been really fun to honor hers and go along with it. we made invitations, at her request, and we invited the people she wanted, so many of them that there's no way they'll all fit into our house, so i'm really hoping that some won't show...

she was very specific as to how the house had to be decorated for the party. don't know where she got this, but just to put it in perspective, our house is really low key - all our furniture is second hand, non-matching, and everything is just very simple. well, sena insisted that she had to have really flashy, sparkly, big decorations; banners saying "happy birthday", pink and gold streamers, that kind of thing. grandma helped with this part - she bought the required materials, and came over to decorate with the girls a few days ago. i went out grocery shopping, and when i got back, sena and aiyana were very proud of the job they had done, and showed me everything. it was fun, and our living room now looks very festive.

here's a little story:
the other day, sena was reading to aiyana. it was a book i had read to them a couple of times before, so sena had it memorized. now, she was reading it to her little sister, which means she was reciting it from memory. i was in the kitchen making breakfast. in the book, there's a tiny sheep who has a crow for her best friend. at one point in the story, the tiny sheep gets on to the crow's back, and as they're about to take off in flight, the crow says to the sheep: "hold on to your hooves". when sena got to this part of the book, i heard her say to aiyana very seriously: "hold on to your boobs!".
they were both really into the story, and when they heard me crack up in the kitchen, they looked up from the book, surprised, and sena said "what?". i explained that it was hooves, not boobs, but they still didn't think it was that funny, but they laughed a little anyway, just to keep me company...

yesterday, the girls and i decided to go tracking at a pond near our house. we've all been into animal tracking since i strted to read "the tracker" by Tom Brown. ed's pretty good at it, he can go into the woods and follow deer around, and tell you what they've been doing, where they're feeding, etc. the other day, he showed us some coyote tracks (very close to our chicken coup, hmmm....), which was really cool (not for the chickens, though).
yesterday, we were reading about beavers and otters and racoons, and sena said that we should go by a pond and see if we could find any tracks. so we did. or at least tried to. our outing didn't turn out to be exactly what i expected (which i should've known by now...)
the main problem was that the snow was way too deep to be able to walk around or even get near the pond without considerable difficulty. the three of us kept sinking in, and aiyana especially, was getting upset about it. she'd sink in up to her knees, then she'd lose her balance and fall, or her boot would get stuck in the snow and her foot would come out of it bare, etc, etc. it wasn't fun. we barely walked 50meters, and we had all had enough. or rather, i had had enough. it had been a tough morning with aiyana being unusually cranky and whiney, and i thought that going out was going to calm us down, but it really didn't turn out that way. so we just walked to this point where we could look over the pond, and the view was really pretty, so we enjoyed that. we did see some deer tracks, and some dog tracks, and we decided that was enough. there was a small park nearby, and the kids wanted to play in the swings even though they were all snowed in, so we did that for a while before heading back to our car. it wasn't exactly what i planned, but it was nice to be out anyway.
i'm glad that sena and aiyana are interested in animals, bc it gives me the opportunity to learn along with them from books and out in the woods. and i find it really fun.

so it's going to be a busy few days with sena's birthday tomorrow and then family Christmas parties.
christmas brings up mixed feelings for me. i love this time of year, i love the season, the snow, all that. i also like the spirit of christmas, the giving, the gathering. unfortunately, i find that the giving gets totally out of hand and loses most of its meaning; people get obsessed with shopping, and there's so much stuff being wasted.
also, although i feel a real need to be with people at this time of year, christmas parties usually leave me feeling lonely and a little sad. i think it's because i expect to feel connected to people when getting together, but somehow i can't get myself into the superficial chit-chat that dominates these gatherings. i hate to sound like i'm so deep or something, and i really don't want to say that i'm better than anyone or anything like that. i'm just trying to honestly express my feelings.

i'm having a hard time finding meaningful connection to people at christmas parties, and maybe i'm looking in the wrong place, but i get sad because i always hope for that. so what's meaningful connection? and how do you establish meaningful connection? i don't think it has to be through 'deep' conversation. i think anything can become meaningful: a good laugh over some little thing, anything we choose to share openly and authentically.
i think that for me, what makes things meaningful is more how we share them, not what we share. so if you're telling a story, for example, sharing some little incident in your life, how are you sharing it? is it coming from an honest, open place within yourself, is it authentic? is your heart, or soul, or essence or whatever you want to call it, coming through? or are you simply speaking without awareness, repeating things you've taken on superficially? it's hard to express exactly what i mean...

but i do yearn for authenticity. and if that doesn't happen at christmas parties, i'm lucky enough to have people in my life that are authentic and fill me with joy at many other times of year. and of course, kids are always authentic.

i think i wrote enough, so i'll end it here, wishing everyone lots of fun.
peace