Author's Note
(27 June 2001):

What if there had been no special baby born in a cave under the stars?  What if all we had had to celebrate the past few thousand years were millions and millions of babies born under the stars -- small humans, growing into wise humans, with no special being to mediate between us and the heavens, no special being given the task of uniquely loving, laughing, bleeding, dying, rising?  What if there were just us, the lovely earth, the watching stars?  What if.......?

What if all the love and tenderness for earth and each other had to come from us alone, witnessed only by the stars?  What if the gods themselves have decreed that we alone hold responsibility for the wonder and fragile beauty of this planet?  Could we not then do a better job of all this? -- with no one to fall back upon but ourselves?  I'm not suggesting that there are no deities or Watchers out there, only that perhaps we have too long depended upon rescue from "out there" instead of focusing upon the innate wisdom and compassion long ago seeded within us.

In this season of Light's birth from the holy, all encompassing, pulsing Darkness, perhaps we could remember that what's really being born, hopefully, is our own ability to mature and navigate gracefully through both Darkness and Light, for the dance between these seeming opposites profoundly enriches the deeper wisdom lying too long unclaimed within us.......

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