We’re all idiots, you know? Every single one of us.
We fight what is in the war-like defense of what we think should be. We refuse to accept a truth until we’re too weary to deny it any longer, then we spend what little energy we have left trying to convince ourselves we were alright with it all along.
We see our own nature, clear as freshly washed glass, and then we smudge it all up trying to aim the pane somewhere else. To harvest a different view.
Seasons, too. Spend a winter wishing for the warm ease of Summer, spend a Spring longing for the fog and falling leaves that Autumn brings. Spend all the light we’ve got wanting dark, spend the long, long hours of pitch after daylight savings time officially ends ruing every moment we wasted desiring the peace that comes when light finally starts its fade away.
There’s another way, and I’ll be damned if I’m not trying my hardest to practice it.
There’s a lean in. There’s something a half-leap beyond accepting what is, and maybe it lives just a hair away from actually joyfully celebrating it. Maybe it’s a simple embracing. Loving, with all the passion it deserves, even if the intensity is something you can’t quite manufacture yet.
Seasonally, in almost more ways than any other, this is something we’re trying to get better at, after all, where you practice, you improve.
First step for us is acknowledging the truth of what is, and the slow eradication of focus onto anything we believe should be. The Autumnal truth of this first Sunday of November, this day that also happens to be the first where we “gain” an hour of sleep because of some arbitrary reshuffling of all the clocks left in a home that do not automatically do it for themselves, is this:
Call it light then, the first on a numbered list in our souls, the initial focus of our practice. Shifting how we feel about it, the way we accept it, the types we allow in. It’s candles now, more than the blaze of overhead LED fixtures our contractor insisted on installing all those years ago. It’s lamps in corners in place of total illumination.
This is a season of less light, and our hunting and gathering, our farming and roughly surviving ancestors knew this without having to practice at all. As light fell away, they lit more candles and ended their days earlier. They snuggled in to the darkness, never trying to drive it away.
Second then, perhaps a call to slowing down. They knew this, we need to too, and Sarah and I speak of it often as we glance to the valley spread out below our deck and see far fewer cars far earlier into the evenings now. This is not a season of ferocious action, of fury, of frenzy, of spin.
This season, the one we name Fall, and there is a reason for it. A fall into stillness, into the hibernation that the colder weather and dimmer shine deliver, and we are trying so hard to accept this. Not all things must be completed, not all battles even need to be fought, let alone won.
Let Go, say I to she, Let Go, says back she to I on days I might forget.
Autumn is now for reflection for she and I, it’s for recollection and not worry. It’s not easy, especially this year being one of such transition for she and I, one where we find this nest empty but somehow our hearts just as full. Look back, for certain, as I do this often and always, but hold not the worry we once did.
Slow down, just slow down.
We’ve wearier bodies than ever before, and I know it will continue this way. We are aging, and I call it beautiful. Practice, I think we must over and over again, in refusing to compare to any others, but more than all things, to ourselves as we might have once been.
Maybe this, more than all things. Aren’t we trees, after all, each and all of us? Aren’t we born to grow our leaves, to stretch towards sunlight, but then, ahh but then, when the sunshine dips and our earth rotates itself ever-so-subtly away from that glowing ball of gas and heat, let those leaves fall?
Aren’t these branches made to not only endure a time of bareness, but to embrace it, to store all the light until it’s needed once again? Aren’t we on this circle we’ve been on for eons and eternities? Haven’t we tread these paths before?
At such great length I have spoken of embracing the darkness within us, how we must practice this, too. Just last weekend I sang these praises for a long time to your eyes and ears, now this time I ask for something deeper: Embrace the darkness around us, too. How, I know I will be asked, how when it feels so thick, so syrupy and viscous? How do we slice through and leave ourselves room for the practicing?
Lean in then, lean and practice and light our candles to pocket tiny pools of glow in these giant growing seas of darkness.
Snuggle in then, and embrace the shift, embrace one another, and forget our nonsensical obsessions on all we think should be in the face of all the beauty that is.
Slow down then, and hibernate, and allow for more rest. All growing things must finally slow, must pause, must wait to grow again.
Let go then, accept the changes we must not only survive, but thrive through. See our branches not as bare, but simply waiting. Leaves will return, they have before, they will again.
It has always been this way.
I love you all.
Be good.
Accept our shadows
embrace the dark around us.
Listen to the light.
