It’s a busy week to write about life no matter where you are or how you slice it – a sort of marathon of shopping, cooking, baking, creating, and socializing squeezed in between full moon eclipse Solstice and Christmas Eve on a Friday. But I wanted to send my love from Mexico nonetheless, especially for this full week of festivities and preparations. Here we are celebrating the “Posadas,” the nine days before Christmas that honor Mary and Joseph looking for room at the inn (posada). It is a time of looking for shelter, an on-going pilgrimage held over from previous weeks of devotion to Guadalupe, and a time of looking for light in the darkness, just as the winter sky reflects to us on the longest night of Solstice. Every night the church bells ring as hundreds of villagers holding candles set out from the church to follow a litter bearing the figures of Joseph and Mary on a donkey. Softly chanting the rosary, candlelight flickering, the people make their way to the posada, a structure of pine-boughs built each night in a different street of the village to provide shelter against the cold to Mary and Joseph. When prayers are finished, play begins. Bags of sweets and cookies are handed out to all the children. Adults huddle around with Styrofoam cups full of hot sugarcane punch and watch the kids beat at piñatas and scramble for the goodies that come pouring out.
The tradition of the piñatas at the posadas is changing about as fast as Walmart can import Santa Claus, and in the few years since I’ve been here, clay pot-based piñatas have been replaced by cardboard ones, and they’re now filled with lollipops and bubblegum instead of oranges and apples. But the excitement is the same, kids tackling each other and falling into a giant pile to grab at treats and scanning the surface of the dark street afterwards to spot any lost or forgotten candies. As long as these traditions last in the villages, there is a feeling of community, of coming together for a moment, of leaving behind our shadows for a bit and embracing our virtues.
During this darkest coldest season, we quest more than ever for a sense of virtue, for a point of light in the darkness, for the warmth of the Sun (called the “poor man’s blanket” here) to win out over darkness and night. This being a world of duality, we have to learn to deal with the darkness, the shadow, and watch the eclipses within ourselves, accepting that perhaps the only shelter we will find is the one inside our own hearts. We have a million symbols to show us this, finding the balance in the duality. We have Mary making her birthing bed on hay in a stable. We have the spectacular full moon eclipse on the longest night blocking out the point of light we were really counting on to illuminate our path back to longer days, as if to say “Accept. Be present with what is. Make Peace with it. May Peace be with you.” When the light of the full moon is blocked out, look beyond and see how much brighter the stars are shining because of it.
The piñata is so traditional here to this time of year, to Christmas time, because of its legendary status in the history of the place. The nearby 16th century ex-monastery at Acolman lays claim to the invention of the piñata (or at least introducing it to Mexico), apparently having been developed by monks there as a Catholic teaching tool for the indigenous people. The original piñata design was a 7 pointed star, each point representing one of the seven cardinal sins. By beating the piñata, one was symbolically beating out one’s sins in a pre-Christmas purification ritual, the rewards of which were represented by sweet things pouring out. I guess those would be the “virtues,” the sweetness promised by aligning oneself with God (or Light/Source/All-That-Is/Creator depending on your point of view). I have to admit, I had to look up what the seven deadly sins and seven cardinal virtues were, not being a big church-goer, and I have to say there is something to them, something to contemplate as we go through life trying to grow and become more conscious. I’m sure these lists vary, but the one I found listed the seven deadly sins as wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony. The seven cardinal virtues are prudence, justice, restraint, courage, faith, hope and love or charity. And of course, there’s that pesky duality again. We are all of it, we humans. We are proud and gluttonous just as we are loving and courageous. While it is good intention to strive for the light of those virtues, we must also strive for balance and strive for acceptance of what is, wholeness, the dark face of the moon included.
I remember when I was 10 years old, my grandmother died right before Christmas, and so we quickly opened Christmas presents with red eyes, and loaded into our VW Rabbit on Dec. 24 and drove from Montana to Nevada for the funeral. My grandmother was a Pall Mall smoking drunk who didn’t get along with a lot of folks, but the sudden loss of her presence during the holidays and the aftereffect on our family lingers with me to this day, often subconsciously, in a certain nostalgia, or a tinge of anxiety, as Christmas lights twinkle around me. But I am realizing that the lesson in it is that there is precisely this duality in the world and what better time to accept it than during the holidays. It is not all glittering light and happy carols. It is the darkest time of the year. Make the most of it and the mythology that surges from it, whether it be Yuletide candles on Solstice, Mary and Jesus on Christmas, or monks beating out their sins in some ancient monastery in central Mexico. And if you want to move beyond duality right now, in your mind, you can always use the prehispanic ritual salute in Nahuatl: “Ometeotl!” Ometeotl is duality merging into Oneness. See, there always is Light out there somewhere beyond it all!
Where is your shelter? What are your virtues? May the Light of this Season bless you and yours and may Peace be with you as you follow the stars home.
Image: Bronze monument/torch of monk breaking piñata with full moon, Acolman Ex-Convento, Feria de la Piñata, Dec. 20, 2010
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