heathen values

wake up on a december morning, the sky is still a dust cloud after weeks of pollution, dust, parts per million becoming parts of the millions living in this bowl. blue skies are sponged out by gray haze, the sun is a nebulous orb, a goopy-eyed spectre. it looks a storybook english morning -- a modern moor sans clotted cream, charming garden gates on rusted hinges leading to winter gardens with ragged, edible roots in handbaskets. in this faux mist -- quaint as a fog machine in a homespun spook alley -- little hints of the past catch glints of muted light. christmas lights are more sporadic this year, and less meticulously placed. nails might be missing, husbands might be missing, ladders not tall enough, or being used to earn money for bread. hope hangs at crooked angles in gingerbread colors, jewel-themed ovals, white or neon icicles still tangled up from their cardboard coffins. wires are not as taut as years past, plugs and outlets are in plain sight, wreaths or gold stars are pinned in solitary confinement, shielded by storm doors. most are just trifles of the holiday -- a public nod to the number on the calendar, to tradition for what it used to mean, or maybe a decree that despair has not consumed this household -- at least not entirely.

december is the darkest month of the year, with the shortest sun-lit hours in the northern hemisphere -- the sun having migrated south for the winter. people go crazy. they spend time away from their families to buy things for their families or work longer hours to be able to buy things for their families, often missing the irony. it is a schizophrenic time, crowds of people are in wind-up mode, doing the opposite of what they think they're doing, and doing it frantically.

it's dark and people get winter blues: seasonal blues, family-induced anxiety, financials-induced melancholia. we suffer an end-of-year crisis when we take stock of our storehouses and ask why it's not overflowing or if it is, why our love chalices are empty or why a void of one kind or another has the audacity to poke a hole in our personal flotation device. a moroccan woman in rabat once told me that moroccans experience seasonal blues during their winter, just like americans. the difference, she said, is that it's accepted as a normal and communal event that everyone talks about the way americans discuss football. it isn't personalized in language either. one would not ask another, "how is your depression?" but rather, "how is the depression?" it's this burden carried by everyone who feels it, and is therefore, a much lighter load. it is also understood that once the season ends, so will the depression.

to stave off the seasonal blues in the darkest parts of europe, heathen folk would drag enormous logs into their villages and light them on fire. the flames would drive out the darkness, the heat would burn up the cold, and people would dance and eat and play music. it was called yule. yule was an all-nighter pagan rave that celebrated the holiness of mothers, of human origin, of the divine feminine. it was about plenty, abundance, and light in the darkness. these celebrations climaxed on december 25th, in a soul-mother celebration called módraniht -- mother's night. as a matter of convenience, the romans decided to co-opt december 25 for christmas purposes. if people were already celebrating that day, they wouldn't mind forgetting why and adopting a completely random, government-endorsed reason for the season.

since we seem to have lost the well-meaning battle to return the meaning of christmas to the roman catholic concept of christmas, perhaps it should be a time of year when we embrace our heathen roots. december is a month of darkness, depression, people have known this for thousands of years. even in the sunny isles of greece, they made up a story to explain the darker days of winter -- it commemorated the abduction of demeter's daughter persephone, who was dragged down to a gloomy underworld by the god of death, hades. electricity and zoloft seem to have rendered our memories quite thin. romans had saturnalia (before christianity presented itself as a convenient form of government that would literally regulate humans in this life and the next). they partied. they lit torches. they did things that cannot be depicted in textbooks. they gathered in halls, huts, yurts, they huddled around blazing fires -- anything to drive out the cold with literal light and flame, coupled with human interaction and a belligerent enjoyment of abundance, rebirth, life and light in a season of scarcity, death, and darkness. it used to be natural response to the season, also an act of resilience inspired by threatening conditions. we seem to have had that down thousands of years ago, but years of catholic reconditioning, puritan ranting, and commercial brainwashing have left us dancing in the mud, not really sure why we still bother.

instead of making christmas all about jesus, why not celebrate his birthday and death day when it actually happened -- in the spring? christmas, or yule, inspires the human instinct for survival. as they did in the yuletide days, people still come together, laugh together, share food and shelter against the brutality of winter. and what happened when people with animal instincts got together under one thatched roof? eating, drinking, merry making. and it didn't revolve around the birth of one man. it revolved around birth in general, our own births, a divine mother, origin, and the promise of rebirth -- because the idea of living in winter indefinitely was unpalatable, even for the burly germanic tribes and norse folk. it was a collective agreement to respond to "the depression" with flippant festivity, praying for redemption in the spring (during rome's newly-designated "month of purification" now known as february -- deliberately the shortest month of the year).

celebration revolved around natural, observable phenomena, like the winter solstice. lunar and solar activity dictated life long before we adhered to a calendar arbitrarily designed by supserstitious roman rulers. imagine if we still observed the activity of the sun and moon as often as we consult a smart phone or a microwave clock. imagine if the effects of the tide, the strength of the sun, the position of the moon, mattered now as it did then. our realities have changed drastically, but have humans really changed? our heathen side reigns supreme -- especially in times when nature has us up against a wall. most people don't stop to ponder on the miracle of a baby born of immaculate conception in the middle east. what if we celebrated mothers from sun down to sun up in a wild, debaucherous saturnalia with raging flames on fallen logs and plenty of figgy pudding (drenched in cognac)? as if to say:

"we are human. we have heathen roots that are sometimes at odds with our divine origin or [we hope] destination. we used to be ruled by the sun, moon, stars. we used to celebrate women as sacred generators of life. we used to drive away the winter cold with unapologetic heathen rituals that had nothing to do with jesus. for one day, or one season, we will give up all pretense of synthetic religion and instead, embrace the unifying truths that apply to all humans struggling to survive. we throw down our weapons, grievances, bad blood, because survival is interdependent. in this season, the will to survive outweighs the need to be right."

heathen values recognize the human condition that christian values implicitly dismissed as a temporary pit stop before we reach the promised kitchen with fresh pie in the sky. in a time of mass identity crises and people waking up from money comas, being human has lost its sanitized, monetized, religionized patina. we are all vulnerable--some of us are realizing that for the first time--and this life might be all we've got to live for.

we need other humans to survive, emotionally and physically. we get sad, especially when it gets dark. we provide light by dragging large logs into our shelters and lighting them on fire. we have mothers, we can all believe in that, just like we can believe in the existence of the sun, the moon, and the likelihood of a vernal equinox. it's not a denial of christianity or trend toward secularism -- it's a return to humanity. it's an acknowledgment of our unique condition and cosmic realities in the universe, which are just as heavenly as the story of a child born in bethlehem + sent to save the world. would we find greater occasion to agree with eachother, love eachother, gather together to share nothing more than warmth, shelter and food if we centered such an occasion on the heathen principles of sun, season, and mothers? would we have any reason for conflict, consumption, war or wal-mart?