The moon is a thin curve of celestial lip against an electric turquoise sky, it's waiting to say something, but shyly lingers by the horizon, a million mile wallflower slowly intoxicated by the boiling light of Venus to come out and dance. The moon, grateful for the flattery, is nonetheless slipping out the back door to a party on the other side of the world's sky. There's a hill in the distance, with an old American gothic farmhouse whose peeling whitewash and abandoned windows wait and watch as the North Carolina mountains are dressed in a transparent shroud of anticipation for the Yuletide. No tree nor wreath will cross the threshold of that house tomorrow, and I stand there transfixed with my shopping bags in hand as a kid in the van next to my car yells out beneath a woolen hat; "Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!" He slams the van's door and it speeds off to a jingly destiny of cheer.

I get in my car and drive past that house, looking lonlier tonight then it ever has. It looms like a gaping mouth, and soon I will shrug off my trespassing worries and surrender to the hidden memories which are drawing my curiosity. But meanwhile, there are things to do, tomorrow is Christmas, after all, and though I'm not going anywhere, I putter and do things because that's what most of America is doing right now. That busy-bee activity is infectious, whether you're anticipating flying reindeer, the virgin birth of a baby, or a day of relaxation and feasting... it's all gotta be done before midnight, or else.

I unpack cheese, cat food and sweet potatoes and look again at the setting moon and swooning Venus... brighter than most ideas, taking up a whole quadrant of sky with it's shimmer, within which molten seas of lead and rains of acid pelt a world that we'll never witness. I wonder, star of wonder, if that was the very glow that attracted the apocryphal wise men two thousand and some years ago. Right now, it hangs over the low yellow efficiency apartments to the south that many migrant families call "casero." Surely, some new and wonderful things will be born under that star tonight.

Imagine; lovers will embrace for the first time tonight, and will carry that moment, forever. In the midst of frenzied shopping, a human will make a loving and tender gesture to another, a stranger, meaningfully, and both will forget for a moment what's left on the to do list. A memory, long since dormant, will be triggered, and someone alone will be warmed by this and perhaps candle-glow. Someone who has led an unremarkable life will die a hero. A fledgling owl will fly through through the night, and will be heard gliding through the trees by someone gather kindling in the forest. A child will be born, against all odds, and for a moment the struggle and haste of life in some dingy place will be forgotten when it's noticed the child's eyes are a pure as pearls, a path to infinity. These things will happen under Venus' watch, a sphere of ardor named after the Goddess of Beauty.

As the sky darkens and this hemisphere of world turns toward expectant sleep, may we recall in our dreams that each day is a Holy Day, that each of us carries within an original spark from that original flame that has brought us all this life, no matter what it does or what we do to it, we are as connected to that rising star as we are to our hands, feet, heart and mind. The ancient light that peers through our bubble of gas, into our retina, into our soul, is older than nations, older than religions, older than even the first traces of bone and sinew as the earth awoke for the first time. That star of wonder, if we allow it, unifies us... it weaves it's flow of protons through disparate peoples, displaced doctrines and damned conundrums. The first eyes gazed upward to it, and later life migrated by it's throne on the starmap. It's a thunk on the head of certainty, if we allow it; every star is, as it beckons us to ponder the infinite from our backyard, or through the windshield of your cozy auto with the heat on and whatever jazz that juices your orchard. It asks us, wandering wise women, men, all beings, to follow it's blaze of joy to behold a miracle. That miracle may be in a manger thousands of years ago, or in the belly laugh of Buddha, the prance of the White Buffalo, or it may be the cat in your lap, purring in contentment since you went to the store and retrieved her cat food.

Low clouds have taken the little corner of sky that's turned my gaze beyond things astronomical toward things inward as a light snow starts to fall. As midnight passes, and a crystalline silence embraces a night whose holiness is shared with all time and all creation, with every second and every aeon, it's not Christmas specifically I'm celebrating... it's being here, it's life, it's that anything exists at all, and that for some odd reason, I and thou are conscious in this dance. That's the festival of lights that's lit every candle in every spiritual teaching everywhere at every time, and has been the fire under the pots of holy madmen and devout pilgrims of questioning.

I've seen life happen, human and otherwise, babies that slip from the womb into the beginning of their history, with ocean blue eyes and the faint curves of a first smile as her name is exulted in the maternity ward... a newly reborn luna moth, drying her moist, unfurled wings on a trippy tennis court at 3AM. I've seen life pass... the old jogger with the little doggie's leash still in his hand, to the sad expressions of powerless kids taking their rage out of captured swamp frogs. Those appear as beginnings and endings, but named or nameless these are merely twists in the thread of continuum, and above longevity or brevity starlight, that star, and billions of other dancers, has shone. That shine is contained within, and dims not when the within is purged to the without. Find it in the sky, or inside, and see where it's leading you... for surely, once you recognize the brilliance, you will hold up your gifts in awe, and know that a new time has come.

I think tomorrow, I will visit that old farmhouse. I'll peek in it's windows, wondering where the tree would've gone with savaged wrapping paper lying in heaps beneath, and out what door generations of excited kids ran into the December air with their new toys, while their families sipped hot cider and sang hymns to something wonderful born under a star, and seeing that glimmer in each other's eye, and in the antics of their children. Though that house is encircled by a tightening noose of stores, highways, and the gnashing of bulldozers, it has a story of it's own to tell. A valid story, like our own history, and though if the house were to talk I wouldn't understand half of it, it is made of great joy and great sorrow, all under the watchful orbit of the Universe. It is good to meet the ghosts and shadows we pass daily, and for a moment discover an intrinsic interconnection to something so vastly different from yourself, that being, the gift of being, held up before light, with hope and promise.

Happy Holy Days.

Rum remark wins Rumsfeld an award

"Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know."