Hope in the chaos

Mid December already. Advent Calendars are being opened, advent candles burning down, children are getting excited, and my local garden centre has become a Christmas shop with a few plants on the side. It’s a time of anticipation and looking forward. Admittedly, the retail sector has been anticipating Christmas since Easter but now it really is approaching.

Looking forward with hope can be difficult sometimes but it’s essential. If we can’t hope, can’t celebrate, can’t reassert and rejoice in our common humanity we cease to be any use to ourselves or others. We don’t need to be church going Christians to share in the message of love and peace, and to keep holding on to the hope of better times. It’s not wrong to feel joy.

So, in the spirit of positive anticipation, I’m intending to enjoy the carol singing, the concerts and services I sing or play in, the Christmas lunches and the get togethers with friends and family and the other activities that December brings. I sang in a joyous concert at the weekend and I’ve spent some time since running through secular seasonal numbers on my sax – White Christmas, I wish it could be Christmas every day, Chestnuts roasting on an open fire and the rest in preparation for some of these activities – and it feels like a healthy slug of dopamine. I’ll be more than ready to play non-Christmas stuff come January but for now I’m happy to wallow.

In the meantime, one of the poetry groups I’m involved with, Write Out Loud has issued a seasonal ‘reverse nonet’ challenge – which means a short poem in which the first line has one syllable, the second two and so on until the last line has nine. My response is below.