It's the holiday season.
Just reading those words evokes varying emotions.
I left a holiday shopping trip tonight stressed and overwhelmed.
Today's holidays leave me feeling inadequate and frustrated. So many people's expectations conflicting and overlapping.
I spend 30 days trying to detangle it all to find a space I can live in. I get bits and pieces of what I want my holidays to be. They come in feelings and ideas and emotions, rarely in things you wrap or consume.
Yet I make the lists and tell people what I "want". I make up things that I think they can easily pick up at the store. Pleasing, detangling. Untying one knot and tangling another.
In a few tiny moments in between, I find a place that feels like me. An unexpected belly laugh between brother and sister. Snoring puppies at my feet in the glow of twinkling lights. An unseasonably sunny day to roll the windows down like a secret only you can keep. A cold and rainy day to bury deep into ideas and feelings. Looking at my daughters photos and seeing the world through her eyes. Listening to the music that lives inside my son that he works diligently to bring to the world.
These are my gifts. These are the gifts I can't put on the list. These are the gifts that don't meet other people's expectations. Personal. Life giving. The gifts that feed my soul. Money is scarce and dreams are infinite. I crave gifts that feed my dreams. Gifts of time. Gifts of peace. Gifts of acceptance and patience and appreciation of my passions.
Tonight the kids and I went to the movies. We go to the movies to leave our own stories and get lost. It's in that place that my heart is on fire. For all the inadequacy I feel in todays holiday, at the movies I feel infinite. The dreams, the stories and the possibilities go on and on.
I wish you an artists holiday. I wish you the place where the story is the gift and the dreams feel infinite.
