At some moment each year,
just as the first Christmas lights
slice through early darkness,
my mind drifts back,
soft as snowfall,
to one crescent moon
more than forty years past.I’d spent the afternoon
perched at the end of my seat
in a velvety movie theatre
smelling of warm popcorn
and winter coats fresh
from cedar chests.
Rapt in buttery awe,
I watched Albert Finney’s “Scrooge”
and was swept into the mystery.I sat trembling,
feeling upended,
as the story plowed deep furrows
into unbroken ground,
churning the soil of my soul
and preparing the fields of my heart
for the crops that grow there today
and others that percolate beneath the ground still.

As the movie drew to a close,
my barely nibbled popcorn slumped to the floor
as I stood up and cheered inside myself
at the transformed and now ebullient Scrooge
prancing around the toy store
grabbing treasures for the Cratchet children
without thought of cost or protocol.
When the dazed clerk asked him,
“Mr. Scrooge, what has happened?”
he replied “It’s very simple.
I’ve discovered that
I ~ like ~ life! ”

As he hurled his heart open,
mine did somersaults inside my chest
and I fell head over heels in love
with the beauty of generosity
……wildly extravagant generosity.

These were not carefully measured out portions
properly dispensed to the deserving;
this was wonderfully inappropriate giving
on a massive scale
~explosive on impact~
and it rattled the timbers of my thinking.

This kind of love
~the unconditional kind
came with hurricane gale force generosity;
I’d expected just a breeze.

As I tumbled from the back seat of our neighbor’s car
into the same front yard I’d left hours earlier
under a brighter crescent moon
than I’d ever noticed before,
I looked up
and felt a love for all things living
that was new to me.

I whispered to the light in the darkness
my wish to give my own life
with joyful extravagance
….not carefully meting out a single rose of affection
but a whole rose garden poured out
like a rogue wave overtaking a sea wall.

It took a Dicken’s Christmas Carol
to fuel the wish and the wonder.
It’s taking a lifetime
to receive the Love I want to much to give
….and to give and give and give again.
But I hold dear to the hope.

And why?
Because I, also,
really like life!