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As one, who used to embody Christmas in all its aspects,
from the magic of wonder in a child’s eye
and the knowing winks between grown-ups
to the sharing of joy and spontaneous bursts of happiness,
I find it now to be a time of quiet celebration.
.
Beyond all the excesses, as many load
each festive moment with unrealistic demands
and insist that we all join in to make it picture-perfect,
I discover a gentle time, a ‘silent night’, in which to experience
the true perfection, that only comes from abandoning all expectation.
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Just what are we celebrating at this time of the year?
For me, the real message of the Christ-child’s birth
is not simply the redemption of the personal
through the descent of grace, but the gift of embodiment,
the gift to Spirit of experiencing the challenges of manifestation.
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Embodiment is God’s gift to Itself.
Unbounded and limitless spirit has clothed itself,
in the specific, the defined, the characteristics of individuality,
and discovers the world of appearances though
the agency of a body and its senses.
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As the individual ‘awakens’ to its true eternal home,
Spirit awakens to itself. Embodiment is the gift of play,
the gift of exploration in an ever-new realm:
a playground for creating new forms and new conjunctions
and ever more intricate expressions of diversity in unity.