Just before Christmas

It has been a long time since I last wrote here. I have been thinking, and contemplating, and busily writing things on paper. That, coupled with the temporary inconvenience of not having internet access, kept me relatively quiet. ME! Can you imagine?

And now it's the day before before Christmas. I am at home waiting for the UPS driver and a package, and for the U.S. Post Office delivery person who does not always put my mail in the correct mailbox, while Mrs. Peel sleeps blissfully and elegantly on the radiator.

All day yesterday, rain tapped at the windows. It was like Christmas in Los Angeles, as I remember it: yuletide rains, warm temperatures, aqua and coral decorations on trees sprayed with fake snow. My friend Howard took me to see a huge poinsettia tree and I suddenly understood why I had never been able to keep my Christmas poinsettia alive: mine was just bunch of twigs stuffed into a beribboned pot. Christmas in L.A. was an experience not of Christmas Past or Christmas Present, but of Christmas Other because it looked so different from what I had grown up with. Christmas under palm trees! How odd it seemed!

And yet, how much more like the first Christmas than our nordic pines and our Dickensian feasts, and Clement Clarke Moore's poem, which does not even mention Jesus (though Moore was a religious scholar, and so how odd that seems, too).

We have not evolved a whole lot since Mary bore that baby. We still wage war and are victims of war, we still oppress and are oppressed. We still have major vision problems - can't see the poor until they are troublesome, for instance, can't see the person behind the skin. And heavens, we are easily distracted by ducks and mileys and penguin santas.

But underneath that, at the same time, we love. The heart is made for love. We are called to love every year, every day, every moment. The media may spin the season, commerce may manipulate our guilt and our desire to please, fellow Christians may tell us we're doing Christmas all wrong, atheists may accuse us of stupidity for doing it at all, and all of that noise distracts us from the not-always-easy but actually quite short to-do list we were given by Jesus: love God, love your neighbor.

Yes, we're flawed. Yes, we mess up. Yes, we don't always do it right. But we return to it, to the task at hand, and there are moments, moments, and shining, and sudden onsets of joy. This Love has no expiry date. And that is good news.

May your days be merry and bright.

 

 

 

 

Comments

[Kevin Ainsworth]

"Twas the night before Christmas
And all through the house
Nothing was stirring
Not even a computer mouse."

Well, your computer mouse was stirring...

Your thoughts on Christmas in LA reminded me of the first Christmas I spent in Australia. It was so strange celebrating Christmas in what seemed like a heatwave in July! I would leave the beach and enter a shop and hear "White Christmas" playing! It made me appreciate just how much our idea of Christmas is formed by having it in the northern winter.

At the heart of Christmas is love and thank you for reminding us of that simple but profound truth.

May you have a very Merry Christmas full of Christmas blessings.

Regards,

Kevin.

PS I hope that you do not find yourself in the same situation as Steed with "Too Many Christmas Trees"! At least you know that Mrs Peel will come to your rescue as well.

[Reilly]

Inspiring, insightful commentary, so perfectly articulated as always! When are you going to start writing for the New York Times?

I hope this day, your birthday, is especially merry and bright! Happy birthday!!

And happy New Year!!

Reilly

[Kevin Ainsworth]

Hi Laurel

Have a very Happy and Blessed New Year.

"Set me adrift on a sea of hope - I'll set my sail to a new horizon."

Regards,

Kevin.

PS "Today is new and so are we."

[Kevin Ainsworth]

Hi Laurel

I recently discovered and bought your album “Feather & Bone” as a Christmas treat to myself. I have to say that ‘treat’ is the right word to use because listening to it is a real treat.

The first thing that struck me when taking the CD out of the case was the feel of the CD itself. I remember when the album art was just as much a part of the experience as the music on the vinyl. Moving to the much smaller CD format has marginalised this to some extent but you found a way to recreate physical art and music as one experience. The embossed Celtic pattern is special to touch and hold and makes it far more than just a normal CD but transforms it into a work of art in its own right. It marks this CD out as being something very special and full of quality. I do not know why you chose to do this but it was definitely the right choice.

Your choice of venue was inspired as well. What struck me was the creativity of that decision and the gamble involved. Many singers, or their Producers, would want to control their environment and the recorded sound of their voices with no external distractions. It would have been easy for you to sing the same songs in the controlled environment of a sound proof studio and your voice would still have been gorgeous but the venue added something indefinable to your already beautiful voice.

I remember somebody telling me many years ago that it is not the notes that shape the music but the space between the notes. I had always equated this to the example of a pot where the space inside gives it a use and stops it from being simply a lump of clay. Yet listening to your album gave me fresh insight into that saying. You were in a venue full of space and that space transformed the music of your voice into something extra special. The space became part of the music and creativity.

There are two ways of transforming music into a form easy to carry on a modern portable music player. One is lossy compression, such as MP3 or AAC, where chunks of musical information are thrown away and lost forever in order to get the file’s size down. The other is lossless compression, such as FLAC, where all the musical information is kept and the file could be reformed to its original size with no loss of information if required. What is lost is the so called non information such as space.

When I compress other albums using FLAC I find that most of them still keep over two thirds of their original size and bitrate. Feather & Bone compressed to well under a third of its original size and bitrate which showed just how much space you used and how important it was.

Your song choice was inspired, in my humble opinion. The first song could be your “mission statement” as there is no answer to the question “How Can I Keep From Singing?”

I grew up in an era of Prog Rock and Concept Albums and I have to say that I love the concept of your album. It is something to listen to and enjoy from beginning to end time and time again.

I would love for you to do a post on your blog about Feather & Bone so that I can post my comments there but, more than that, I would love to know much more about the album and your creativity. Your sleeve notes are comprehensive but I would still love to ask you lots of questions about it. I suspect, though, that I would not be asking the right questions when it comes to “decisions of a creative mind.”

I know that this is an album you made many years ago and creatively you may have moved on but to me this is a brand new experience. To me it is “new and now and fresh” and there will be countless others in the future who discover it and find it to be “new and now and fresh”.

I think if you were to write about it now that it would be in a creative way which would delight and surprise us.

God made us in His image and delights in our creativity. It struck me, while listening to the album, that you have gone back to the very first act of creativity for your inspiration. Genesis 1 v.1-3 says: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.”

A voice in space creating light from darkness.

What a beautiful way to sum up your album.

Regards,

Kevin.

PS Is “Radiant Flame Of Gold” also known as “Brigit Over Troubled Water”...?