The Dragon at the Manger

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How we Create Worlds with our Beloveds

What? You don't have a purple dragon in your nativity scene? 

Why do I have a purple dragon in my nativity scene?  

Simple, she's one of my beloveds. And my nativity scene honors what I love and the world I crave.

She fits right in, actually, with all the other nonhumans. 

Yup, I have a human-free nativity. 

Santa comes the closest but as the poem says, he's a right jolly old elf. There's also an angel.

But the Holy Family are black bears. They are tended by moose, mountain goats, rabbits, raccoons, cardinals, mice, a beaver, a fox, a skunk, a squirrel - animals are my beloveds.

It's not that I don't love humanity. I do. I have deep love and compassion for humans.

I don't always like them. 

They can be a hot mess, frankly. And they haven't done the greatest job at honoring our planet and our animal kin.

In the world I crave, animals are equals. In fact the whole of the natural world is held as precious and honored and stewarded as such.

I don't think it's coincidence that the story of Jesus' birth is filled with animals. We are always held by nature, by the Mother, as we enter into significant transitions.

We humans also haven't done the greatest job at honoring each other (and the Understatement of the Year Award goes to...) 

My animal laden nativity scene might be a stretch, but no more so than all the manger scenes sporting a blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus. (Humans have a tendency to rewrite history to serve their agenda.)

We humans have excelled at othering.

This Christmas Eve, war rages. Children starve. Guns slaughter. Hatred churns. 

Billionaires gobble resources and hoard wealth that could liberate the planet. 

Here in the USA, ICE targets people because of the color of their skin. 

Gerrymandering efforts seek to silence Black voices.

Women's bodily autonomy - never fully realized - is once again shrinking.

And a political push is underway to ban gender-affirming care for minors. Given the statistics on suicide rates in the transgender community (with up to 81% thinking about it and up to 42% attempting), this equates to a death sentence.

As in the story of the birth of Jesus, the world is full of darkness.

It is easy to despair. Where is the light? Where is our love for each other? 

If we have the stamina to look, we can find it for it is still there. 

It's just not making headlines. It's not plastered on billboards, not pulling all the clicks on social media. 

It's happening in a million little ways in communities across the world. Foodbanks, tiny home communities for the unhoused, GoFundMe accounts for medical expenses, vigils for those wrongly detained, dog rescues, wildlife rehabilitation, taking a moment to light the candle of the person sitting next to you at the candlelight service. (As the song reminds us, it is better to light just one little candle than to stumble in the dark.)

None of these are big, bold gestures. They won't win awards or get movies made about them.

But they breathe life into the ether of love. They put us in touch with what is most beautiful about humanity - our compassion, our joy, our creativity.

And the nativity to me, the story of the baby in the manger, reflects this love and gentleness and kindness, that what we crave can be born into the humblest of circumstances.

It reminds us of one of the greatest powers we humans have, the power to choose who and how we be, especially in challenging times. 

Let's embrace this freedom. 

We can choose to surrender to the darkness as defeat or as alchemy. 

We can accept that the world presents us with what is life-defeating but also choose to move with what is life-enhancing. 

We can choose to dance with what we love whether others approve or not.

We can choose to celebrate what matters to us in ways that matter to us.

We can see people committed to separation and choose, instead, to embrace community.

In a way, there are people in my nativity scene because the purple dragon represents a community I hold dear, the Field of Tantra Maat, where CreateAWorld was born.

And like the baby in the manger, CreateAWorld is not splashy, or elaborate, or famous. Its voice is but a whisper in the world - of love, of compassion, of possibility. 

But a whisper can birth a movement.

Help us amplify and expand CreateAWorld's voice. Share it with a friend. Comment on a post. Reach out to us and tell us what you'd like to see us explore.

And however you do or don't celebrate this day, take a moment to lean into the possibility of what our world could be if we each moved with what we deeply loved.

Imagine... a world of people so steeped in joy, so fulfilled by creating, so on fire with being in their magic that hatred and violence lose their grip and each person sees themselves in every other person, every other living thing. 

Imagine the world of the One Soul Human embodied (where how we show up reflects the reality that we are all connected, we are all one).

Imagine light and love as the water we swim in, the air we breathe.

Imagine a world where purple dragons and black bears have as much of a place in a nativity scene as shepherds and kings.

Imagining is the first step in creating a world.