mass if christ

Christmas eve. In New Zealand. While putting the brownies together after a fantastic dinner of wild boar, roasted beets and tender small potatoes with herbs, I was in the warm kitchen with my house hosts Gerry the Scot (hiding my chocolate) and Sally the Brit (taking my side) and Chris the engineer, on the floor properly sorting the plastic.

The champagne and red wine had just made me a little brighter, and I felt so fully immersed in the moment. This surreal moment of making my home under a southern hemisphere sky surrounded by emerald hills and black tattooed beauties.

Now that I'm here, and comfortable, it all seems so easy. Like, it wasn't such a struggle after all to get here, to close up my life in Michigan, to end contracts and kiss goodbye. But that's just an illusion isn't it? I was just reeling last night from the lasting imprints of goodbye kisses.

Thankfully, the summer days just go on and on and it's nearly always appropriate to wear sandals. It makes it easier to ignore the holiday altogether.

Except that tonight, with the fantastic feast and after the boisterous traffic today in town, there is just a kiss of festive in the air. In the lovely warm, lightly wet air.

I am pondering what it was exactly that brought me here. Why am I filled with such wanderlust? What is it that drives some to explore and roam and others to settle in and grow generations of people on the same small section of land? I can't comprehend the latter sort. I wonder at their expensive cars and furniture when they claim nonchalantly to have never seen the ocean or the mountains. But, for the cost of a lazyboy they could have driven right up to the top of pike's peak. 14,ooo feet above sea level. Where cougars and bears yet roam!

It's like the people who don't read. How rare is literacy in the history of the world? And how rare to couple literacy with the information age? To choose not to use such a gift confounds me.

But I digress.

It's like being born speaking english in a rich country and opting not to use such an advantage to roam.

There. That's an explanation. But one that just credits my unspeakable intelligence and good taste. And I'm bound to admit that it's just a good argument and not the reason. At all.

I may never live long enough to know the whys for such things. Maybe I'll live long enough to realize it doesn't matter to know.

Here I am anyway, nearly an entire day separated from my younger brother and his new child experiencing his first Christmas, and from my dearest friends, all of them strikingly beautiful. So much so that I long for their soft kisses and skin at this very moment. The spicy blonde who can whip me just how I need and the tender brunette who will slow dance with me into the wee hours.....the curvy cosmic sister whose gaze has mesmerized and whose lap full of queens has rocked my imagination into the wettest daydream. The ears I held in the cold, coat unzipped to listen to hear the heart beat.....second mother, first mother, father.

Talkative Persephone and my saviour Cha-Ska........

All so far away.

It makes more sense that we are just animals living out the will of nature and that ego persuades us otherwise. Why else does it feel so good to leave such love for unknown?

Well, the brownies are finished and I must be sharing them now. My love to the new continent, the island underbelly of the world.

Sending all of you the wettest kisses and the longest embraces until we meet again.