Nine ladies dancing

On the ninth day of Christmas, it's time to begin
reflecting on what gifts the new year may bring
but reflection is one thing, another to care
what gifts that we have and with others will share.

What I hope has been becoming clearer over the past week or so is that what is important to us was important to our forebears, that what is essential for us has not changed all that much over the years, that the intangible, feeling-based parts of life are just as existentially significant now as they have ever been. What has changed over the course of human development has not been so much our needs, wants and desires, but rather how we express them and how we think about them.

Though people have generally always been people, how we see and understand the world around us has changed. The early stories surrounding this time year were clothed in stories of light and warmth, in myths of sun-related, larger-than-life figures, but most of that has faded into the commercialist background of Santa Claus and economic stimulation. The meaning that those stories was held has become pale through lack of use. In other words, as the expression of what lies beneath and behind the stories has changed, we have changed the content itself. We moderns feel we have outgrown the childish stories of the path, but all that has happened is that we have cut ourselves off from our roots and prevented that we ever really grow up.

This time of year was established to remind us of how much we need one another to survive. And that hasn't changed over the almost two million years of proto-human and human history. There is no lone wolf, for wolves are pack animals. There is no individual apart from the group of which s/he is a part. We don't succeed on our own – though we have to do our part, no argument there – but rather through the help and support of others. These are human universals and it is time that we started admitting that trying to eliminate this part of our nature is not making us more human, rather it de-humanizes us.

We are confronted with a number of existentially serious issues: the climate/environment, the destabilizing of the eco-sphere; the exhaustion of resources, the overproduction of waste; the divide between the have's and have-not's, the dangerous inequality between rich and poor; the proliferation of violence on all levels (not just war, but crime rates, child abuse, mental disturbances, brainwashing, and more); the spread of disease and inhuman living conditions (it should matter if anyone starves to death on this planet). These affect us all, regardless of their causes, regardless of how they came to be issues. They are all issues in which we, human beings, have had a hand in creating. And it is for that very reason that it is up to us to do something about them. Yes, US, not the people across the street, or some foreigners in some faraway place, us. You, me, everybody you know, everybody I know, and everybody that they all know and beyond. Once again, it becomes clear: "we" is more important than "me".