It’s seriously autumn now. The trees are quickly losing their leaves, building a winter quilt on the earth below. But their colors have suddenly appeared and are reaching their vivid peak as I write. This is the season when I turn my attention to the sky. I live in the woods, and in summer the leaves block out the sky. But when the leaves go, the sky returns. Ah, I say to myself as I notice it, winter is coming.
“I think its going to be a tough one,” I say to the trees and critters around me. They seem to agree. We’ll get through it as best we can, as always.
That’s nice, the always of things. No matter what happens, what turns, what rises and falls, we’ll do the best we can, as we always have, regardless of the nature and speed of the changes. We endure. The part of ourselves that matters.
I look at the old maple up on the hill. It will stand there, its branches bare and exposed to sleet and winds all the winter through, its children gone. But a squirrel has built a fine nest on the far end of that limb up there. See? I think the tree likes that.
My kitchen smells of spices. I baked a pumpkin bread with cranberries today. Its fragrance fills the whole house. I’m letting myself fall into the season’s spell. I open myself to appreciating its textures and colors, its fragrances and change of light.
Nevertheless, the heaviness of the time that’s upon us now doesn’t escape my notice. We all feel the weight of it. It has a certain quality of strain about it, as if we’re all expecting something momentous, some great clarity, suddenly to appear. It reminds me to pay attention. To this moment. The big of it, the depth.
I continue to remember to play “Watch and let go.” The game reminds me how much time we all spend in trances, lost in our mental movies. That, too, is something you can see and then let go, and then watch to see what’s coming along now. Because now is always unfolding. It never sits still. And it doesn’t have any edges either. You ever notice that? How time flows so seamlessly from one scene to another, one season to another, one decade . . . We float between wakefulness and trances and sleeping all the time, through dreams and memories, hopes and plans. And then all of a sudden we find ourselves looking with surprise at the reality of the material world around us, this place of complex mystery that we all share, this, our platform for action. Life is such an amazing place.
As you settle in to the season now showing outside your door, may you find as you watch and let go, and watch and let go, again and again and again, that you find the rhythm of it pleasing so that joy may dance at your side.
Warmly,
Susan