The sun was shining on Tuesday and I took a photo of the shadow of a hand-made windchime we bought at Arcosanti in Arizona. In the photo I see a Chinese character, and though the Chinese character for poetry is often translated as “speech temple”, I find myself with these words of Carl Sandburg: Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance.
Yesterday in a Sensory Awareness Zoom call, Misty Hannah led with the theme of “The Weight of a Pause”.
I kept hearing the word wait as I allowed gravity’s pull down, and the responding upward stretch, like a plant, rooted to respond to the call of the sun.
For many of us this week between Hanukkah, Christmas and New Year’s is a pause, a time to reflect and transition to what invites us to explore in the new year.
I’m with the words of Thich Nhat Hanh from the chapter Lotus Tea in his book At Home in the World.
“Years ago in Vietnam, people used to go out onto a lotus pond with a small boat to put some tea leaves into an open lotus flower. The flower would close in the evening and perfume the tea during the night. Then, in the peace of early morning, when the dew was still glistening on the large lotus leaves, they would return in the boat with their friends to collect the tea. On the boat, they would take everything they needed to make delicious, fragrant tea: fresh water, a stove to heat it, teacups, and a teapot. Then in the beautiful early light of dawn, they would prepare the tea right there, enjoying the morning and drinking tea in the lotus pond. Nowadays we may have a lotus pond, but we do not seem to have time to stop and look at it, let alone to enjoy it by making tea and drinking it in that way.”
May we give ourselves that immersion in time, and honor the weight of the pause.
I rise for my journey south to be with family but read Heather Cox Richardson first, and learn how NORAD started tracking Santa’s sleigh on Christmas Eve.
From Heather: On December 24, 2025, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, will celebrate seventy years of tracking Santa’s sleigh.
According to legend, the tradition of tracking Santa’s sleigh began in November 1955, when a child trying to reach Santa on a telephone hotline advertised by a Sears, Roebuck & Co. store in Colorado transposed two digits. It was not Santa who picked up the phone, but Colonel Harry Shoup of Continental Air Defense Command, known as CONAD, located in Colorado Springs.
He realized this was an opportunity to promote our air defense system that protected us and Canada from Soviet bombers coming over the North Pole.
A few weeks after the young child’s call, Shoup told his public-relations officer to inform the news wire services that CONAD was tracking Santa’s sleigh as it traveled from his home at the North Pole. Reporters loved the story, and the following year they called to see if the trackers would be operational again.
In 1957,* Canada and the U.S. formed the North American Air Defense Command, or NORAD. By charting Santa’s ride, the agency illustrated the military’s mission to protect the citizens of the continent by tracking an object traveling from the North Pole, over the Arctic Ocean, to Canada, and beyond.
By Christmas Eve 1960, NORAD was posting updates and tracking the flight of “S. Claus.” It reported that the sleigh had made an emergency landing on the ice of Hudson Bay. When Canadian fighter jets stopped by to check on the incident, they found Santa tending to a reindeer’s injured foot. Once the animal was bandaged, the jets escorted Santa’s sleigh as he completed his annual flight. Since then, fighter jets have frequently intercepted the sleigh to salute Santa, who reins in his team to let the slower jets catch up.
Over time, NORAD became the North American Aerospace Defense Command, and its mission expanded to include collecting information about the Earth’s atmosphere, coastal waters, and intelligence. It is still key to U.S. and Canadian defense.
And what began in 1955 as a way to familiarize war-weary Americans with Cold War–era defense systems has become an operation in which more than 1,000 Canadian and American military personnel, Defense Department civilian workers, and local participants near Colorado Springs, where NORAD is headquartered, volunteer to answer the more than 100,000 phone calls that come from children around the world on Christmas Eve. It is a testament to the longstanding U.S.-Canadian friendship.
For one night a year, the hard-edged world of international alliances, intelligence, radar, satellites, and fighter jets turns into a night for adults to create a magical world for children.
This morning, I sat by the window andI watched the day come to light. Already I see and feel a change, an internal harmonizing with the tilt of the earth’s access which brings this change where I live. The light is young, new, and tender, as it reaches into our own internal and receptive light.
I’m reading One Hand Clapping: Unraveling the Mystery of the Human Mind by neuroscientist Nikolay Kukushkin. It allows me to appreciate even more the evolution and adaptation that lead to the creation of lungs, sight, perception, connection.
I contemplate this poem by Zen Master Issa:
This world of dew
Is a world of dew
And yet, and yet …
And I welcome and meet what’s continually new., the changing of the Light.
It’s the time of year where we more openly share and celebrate our gifts. My son sent me this: I know you like carrots for eye care. Well, one of the greyhound people has a blind dog named Teddy. They got him an emotional support carrot to help him see.
Is this sweet or what? Who cannot be touched?
A friend gave me the book The Poet and the Silk Girl inscribed with the author Satsuki Ina’s dedication, Okage Sama De which means I am here because of those around me. The literal translation is: I am here because of the shade you provided me. I’m with that today, the day before the shortest day of the year, tomorrow, Sunday, at 7:03 AM PST.
I think of two quotes by Pablo Casals.
We ought to think that we are one of the leaves of a tree, and the tree is all humanity. We cannot live without the others, without the tree.
The child must know that he is a miracle, that since the beginning of the world there hasn’t been, and until the end of the world there will not be, another child like him.
And each day, a new birth, a miracle.
Newly six year old Grandson was concerned that we’d lost the reins tying the reindeer to Santa’s Lego sleigh so he requested a piece of string, and here we are with the world intact.
This is the last stanza of William Stafford’s poem “Grace Abounding”.
I’m saved in this big world by unforeseen
friends, or times when only a glance
from a passenger beside me, or just the tired
branch of a willow inclining toward earth,
may teach me how to join earth and sky.
The news of our country is staggering, and it is December, a time of gathering and celebrating what connects us with nature and the seasons, the nature in each of us. On Tuesday, I was at Cavallo Point and yesterday took the ferry to San Francisco for our yearly book club gathering at The Waterfront. One half of the restaurant was closed because the ever-increasing winter tides came flooding in.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration said it will dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, one of the world’s leading Earth science research institutions. One reason is that their research shows climate change. The other is that the Colorado governor won’t obey Trump in pardoning former Colorado election official Tina Peters, convicted by a jury for state crimes in facilitating a data breach in her quest to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Trump has granted her a “full pardon”, of course, but it needs to be Governor Polis who pardons her since it is a state crime.
And so we approach the Solstice, a time in the northern hemisphere to honor the richness in the dark and return to the evolving expansiveness of light.
I rise at four, meditate and open Arthur Sze’s poetry book, The Glass Constellation, to these lines in the poem “The Flower Path”.
You must learn to see a pond in the shape of the character mind,
Walk through a garden and see it from your ankles;
Wondering what the shape of the character mind is I ask AI who responds:
The primary Chinese character for “mind” is 心 (xīn), which looks like a stylized, simple drawing of a physical heart, with a central vertical line, two curved strokes on the sides, and a dot at the bottom, representing the ancient belief that the heart is the seat of thought and emotion, often translated as “heart-mind”.
And then I wonder if AI is a who, which brings me to Dr. Seuss’s book Horton Hears a Who!, and the words “a person’s a person no matter how small”, and as the mind curves in the shape of a heart, I think of how tragic it is that we have people leading our country who’ve never read Dr. Seuss.
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