Inebriated ZigZag Journeys: From Displacement to Soul Food

Shrouded in darkness, mild flurries caressed the maritime countryside leaving behind pockets of salty snow for Christmas morale. Like a good elfin pan, I crafted into the night listening to old Steve Martin interviews... Our son made some wonderful gifts at school, like a family Christmas Calendar. Very well done! And lo and behold, despite my protestations about the focus on material gift giving, Santa came after all...much to my son's delight.

Everyone knows that the consumerism monster has gotten out of hand, yet we continue to feed the beastly master, unleashing him from his cage every year like clockwork come December. A cocktail of greed, hysteria, guilt, and unsated desires puts a lot of people past the tipping point, as they race around town hoarding booze, chocolate and rubbing their credit cards through tiny slots at cash registers from store to store, like crickets rubbing their legs together. This is the music of Christmas: cha-ching cha-ching, botta-boom, botta-bing. It's the chaotic crinkling of wrapping paper, tissue and bows, ravaged by kids pumped on GMO-cornsyrup-candy who tear through gift after gift until everything is opened, like a frenzy of mosquitoes on supple flesh of a newborn fawn in the dead and still of an ice cold winter. It's the moaning of family members in painful stoopers with aching joints and sore muscles. It's the droning of an antique vampire, a sedated fixture, a living relic of a bygone era, sunken into an armchair, mumbling incantations, musty racism and a percolating fervor for wartime. Spitting judgment through broken teeth and a tense jaw. It's the shrill screams and the frustrated sighs, as everyone shares their genuine love through all the banality of the corporeal machinations and obligatory gestures with uncomfortable relations.

We all know that Christmas is about love, sharing, and community. It's about joy, merriment, and peace of earth. Yet, who surrenders to a theta state recognition of the divine within us all? Who rides a wave of bliss through the perfume isles of Nordstrom's looking into everyone's eyes in dreamy recognition of our interconnectedness? Who stretches their yogic hearts holding Namaste on their lips down the Lego isle of Toys R Us? Who among us feels himself embodying Christ consciousness in line for coffee samples and one inch square pieces of spanikopita at Trader Joe's? Who among us feels herself fashioned in the likeness of the Madonna, touched by God, as she agonizes over which dangling over-sized purse with retro fringe to buy Mother-in-Law?

We plow through crowds of strangers with our eyes glued to tiny glowing screens, racking up credit cards on our zigzag journeys to get to Peace on Earth and Goodwill Toward Men. And when we arrive at our destinations, pumped full of cappuccinos, Bailey's Irish cream, tiramasu, and easy bake mini mushroom turnovers, decked out in our shiny a glittery accoutrement, do we remember to feed our souls? Do we dance like gypsies, sing like naked natives on tropical beaches, do we drink the medicine of the elders? Do we dump the drama of interpersonal relationships and petty frustrations like a cement mixer at a graveyard, before the waist hardens our arteries, ferments in our intestines, festers in our worn down, pathogen-abiding human bio-domes before we get to the place wear cats purr, children coo, and angels steal our inebriated focus twinkling on the tops of pine trees in our indoor living room forests?