A BEattitude Returned

Bestowing a Plan BE approach to these last days of 2025.

"Love gambles away every gift God bestows. 

Without cause God gave us Being;
without cause, give it back again."
Rumi

My dudes. I should be decorating the tree, cleaning the house, going for a walk, shopping for gifts, writing my book, doing work, etc. but instead I am thinking back to my BEattitude list from 2010, in which I conceived of a way of being, an outlook, an intention for each month of the year.

December that year was Bestow. Those dozen BEattitudes comprise just one of my many unborn book babies, patiently gestating.

But here and now, Bestow returns me. During a year where there really won’t be much under the tree or many peeps around the tree. It will be a quiet holiday and there’s something that I supersonic love about having a low-key season. More be, less do in the whole do-be-do-be-do dance of life.

The etymology of bestow suggests notions of placing or stowing something. I’m OK if that thing is not so much a tangible thing as it is simply a love ethic, emanating from within like the lit candle on Christmas Eve that we hold in hand so we can then illuminate our neighbors’ taper candles.

Speaking of candles, Hanukkah begins this evening. Bring on the menorahs, the dreidels, the latkes, and the ancient flame of remembrance that we are all one.

I took a wee break and began unpacking the decorations and fiddling with the tree branches, unfurling their fakery to point every which way in jaunty fashion. I’m delighted that we gave our tree the Ozempic treatment. (See how that brand name is now eponymous in our lexicon for skinny?)

I lit a scented candle, yelled repeatedly at Alexa (she only listens to Curt) and now have a whole classical Christmas vibe streaming throughout our upstairs. Her royal Pissyness is asleep on her chartreuse velvet cushion on the floor, the furnace is humming along with the strains of a Celtic harp, and I am back to clickity clacking on the keyboard.

I don’t know why. I guess because there are cobwebs in my brain right now, the ghosts of holidays past are making their apparitional presence known, and that feeling of amentalio (named in John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows as the phenomena of forgetting a loved one’s small details) has enveloped me all of a sudden. Unwrapped vintage ornaments has a way of unleashing that into the ether this time of year.

I’ve been low-key addicted to all the paper craft reels I’ve seen pop up on my scrolling phone screen this month. Who knew we could make all those amazing things from empty toilet paper rolls and the like? I know there are people who’d be horrified at the thought of such crafty tackiness, but I am not one of them. Rock, paper, scissors is forever and a day my peace, love, holiday vibe.

I know it’s mid-December and I’m only just starting to turn my attention to Winter Solstice and the Yuletide, but I rather like ruminating on the concept of Bestow, not as one of gifting and generosity, but as a sense of stowing and tucking away a precious way of being so that no matter what is going on out there, my sense of what’s secretly stashed away in here — be that faith, calm, enough, simplicity, magic, joy, or even a certain sort of grief that loves to attach itself to joy — stays hidden like an ornately wrapped present tucked beneath the tree. Not to quell it but to inshell it.

And that’s exactly what I plan to do - tuck a slip a paper with my holiday reminder word and perhaps an inspiring quote into a box and wrap it to place under the tree where it can work its mystery and magic.

Because mystery abides and sometimes all we can do is allow this universal law of ineffability to pervade, especially under this umbrella of darkness, not just in this week before the shortest day of the year, but these tumultuous times. I am relegating anything that confuses me these days, which is most everything and everyone, to an audible sigh exhaled back out to that great spiraling question mark in the sky that I sometimes see on starry, starry nights. Mystery to mystery, breath to breath, void to void.

Maria Popova’s Spell Against Despair post today was timely, welcome, and worthy of the time it takes to click and savor every rabbit hole link. Her page is where I found the poem below.

OK, enough procrastinating. My skinny tree awaits her sparkly trimmings.

Love eternal, my friends.

Beatitude

by John Keene

Love everything
Love the sky and sea, trees and rivers,
mountains and abysses.
Love animals, and not just because you are one.
Love your parents and your children,
even if you have none.
Love your spouse or partner,
no matter what either word means to you.
Love until you create a cavern in your loving,
until it seethes like a volcano.
Love everytime.
Love your enemies.
Love the enemies of your enemies.
Love those whose very idea of love is hate.
Love the liars and the fakes.
Love the tattletales and the hypercrits, the hucksters and the traitors.
Love the thieves because everyone has thought
of stealing something at least once.
Love the rich who live only to empty
your purse or wallet.
Love the poverty of your empty coin purse or wallet.
Love your piss and sweat and shit.
Love your and others’ chatter and its proof of the expansiveness
of nothingness.
Love your shadows and their silent censure.
Love your fears, yesterday’s and tomorrow’s.
Love your yesterdays and tomorrows.
Love your beginning and your end.
Love the fact that your end is another beginning,
or could be, for someone else.
Love yourself, but not too much
that you cannot love everything and everyone else.
Love everywhere.
Love in the absence of love.
Love the monsters breeding
in every corner of the city and suburb,
all throughout the soil of the countryside.
Love the monster breeding inside you and slaughter him
with love.
Love the shipwreck of your body, your mind’s
salted garden.
Love love.

from Punks: New & Selected Poems (The Song Cave, 2021).