There is really nothing different today from any other day.

Nothing really different this season than any other season.

Our holiday traditions during these dark days of winter tell us beautiful stories about our cultures, be it the lighting of the Kinara or Menorah, or the idea of a birth of a special baby boy. Pagan flavours are the ones many enjoy the most: the fir tree in the house, the reindeer, the fat man with the Viking beard who slides down a chimney.

Whatever our faith or tradition, we find reasons to gather. Reasons to hope and be confronted by hopelessness. Reasons to love and be challenged by seeming loss of love. Reasons to make it all worthwhile.

Loneliness is the exquisite price of our desire to connect. Pretence is a habit grown from fear of the truth, and when it feels as if happiness is so hard to find, this is exactly where understanding begins.

Our holidays are truly nothing more than the intensification of what we live every day. They are the opportunity to magnify our desires and our fears. They are a chance to see what we want so much and all the reasons why we are given what we need instead.

Blessings come freely when we stop trying. I turn my heart, my love, my holiday wishes over to something much greater, to the awakening of human freedom. The power to say yes, to light a candle in the darkness. To give a gift for no reason. To say goodbye to the part of me that clings to what I fear to lose.

Love needs no reason. The Divine is present, every moment of every day.