At holiday's end

At holiday’s end

Here we are at the end of the holidays, it’s back to work tomorrow and a whole new year to play around in.  I tend to think of the holiday period as lasting from roughly the Winter Solstice through New Year’s, all one long time of celebration, contemplation, and reflection. I’m not a Christian, so to me Christmas is more a cultural holiday, a window back into its roots as a pagan festival for the dark time of the year. I’m not really a Jew, either, so my celebration of Hanukah usually consists of copious amounts of candles and the occasional the desire to make latkes. Over the years the holidays for me have become more and more about the magic that happens at solstice, the cycles of nature, darkness and light, the changing year. It is a chance to both look back and look ahead. And of course an opportunity to indulge in some new books to read and some tasty treats to munch on.

As creation stories go, instead of the breath of God across the waters (though that is pure poetry, admittedly) I’d usually rather think about Coyote, hanging out on a raft in the endless sea, convincing his duck brothers to dive down into the deep and see if there is anything down there that could be used to change things up a little. When the ducks find mud and a root way down there, Coyote has them bring up a bill-full, blows on the mud, and tosses it out to become land. Hooray for land, they all say. They plant the root and all the thousand thousand different sorts of plants begin to grow. The ducks suggest the flat land isn’t very interesting, so Coyote goes about shaping valleys, mountains, streams, and lakes. The ducks are satisfied but Coyote is not. It’s boring, he says, we need companions! And so began the process of creating humans, animals, fish, birds. But even then he isn’t satisfied. We all need something to do, he says, besides sex (he winks). And so he creates dance and music, tools and art.

Coyote’s character is different from tribe to tribe, region to region, but whether he is a fool, a villain, a creator, a teacher, he’s always a bit of a Trickster. He gets in trouble, tries new things, gets jealous, does a lot of stealing, and very often gets bored. But from the scattered chaos that Coyote churns up, come some beautiful things. Like the night he got frustrated and bored with systematically placing stars up into the sky, the way he’d been told to by the Creator. Finally, he got so exasperated with the orderly process that he chucked a whole bag full of stars up at once, making a huge, glorious mess, and the Milky Way.

Gregory Bateson, in his have-to-read-each-page-twice, “Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity,” writes about stories as, “a little knot or complex of that species of connectedness which we call relevance.” He goes on to say that the habit we humans have of thinking in stories does not isolate us form the rest of nature. He insists that “thinking in terms of stories must be shared by all mind or minds, whether ours or those of redwood forests and sea anemones.” He goes on to explain that, for the sea anemone, that story is inherent in the unfolding of its embryology, and again, in a larger context, in its evolutionary development. He states that anatomy is analogous to grammar. Rightly or wrongly, I went on from this to believe that evolution itself was a process of learning. That mutation is an expression of curiosity, or perhaps aesthetics. Like Coyote, we get bored with one pattern after a while, and want to try on different ones. In this way, the dance of the whole universe, its in-breath and out-breath, the formation of all the things of the world, are an act of art, of storytelling.

It seemed appropriate, to me, that on New Year’s Eve afternoon a coyote walked into our yard and stayed awhile. He reared up on his hind legs to eat what was left of the low-hanging apples on the tree outside our door. He snuffed around the giant compost heap, pouncing to catch mice. Eventually he disappeared off up the hillside – a gap between one blink and the next where he vanished beneath the barbed wire. At the birth of a new year with so much uncertainty, coyote seemed the right totem. Trickster, fool, mess-maker – it is through his genius for getting into trouble that new discoveries, new ways of being, new insights, happen. He rattles and shakes the structures of what is so that something new can be built.

It may be a painful process … and its definitely not a predictable one – but that is my hope for 2017.

Can you see the coyote?