It is not cold, far from it, summer holds heat for as long as she can in bright harshness that prickles my skin, sweat trickling down my brow. At times life abruptly brings everything to a pause as if you’d been a run on sentence desperate for a comma, a semi colon, and even a period which is hard and final. Yet, I now sitting in this connundrum of grammar see how many sentences form the narrative of existence that creates our story no matter if a mere essay or a rambling tome which you can easily lose track of characters and places and soemtimes the story itself.
The flash of hummingbirds whiz by as they battle for the sweet nectar they drink from plastic flower feeders. I am part of their hibernation preparation. No one prepared me for this.
How can we ever know what is to come and how to best bend to those winds? The trees are only there to say, “Look!”, but often we fail to recognize their dance. To retire has nothing to do with age, it encompasses and defines a journey that has ended. If we are here to learn than surely it is these rhythms of cycles we must master. For all our seasons, we cling hardest to summer like children freed from schooling. We are reckless and far more wild in those hot long effervescent days that pull us outside to play as if we are all kids again. Autumn, inevitably, is melancholy, it requires we let go of that youth and check our colors before letting something go. What it is to give yourself the permission to be free, allowing yourself to lean into the youth and remember.
As nature changes before us, we accept the inevitable requirement of life that to resist will only cause more suffering but rather to surrender as she does, unleashes a radiance of color, the glow so gold that the fields seem to reveal bales of rolled honey not hay. In a wintering it is asked that we truly hibernate in solitude, in deep reflection, in darkness. It is a call like the anthem of the Canada geese or like a blanket of snow in which there is much that matters under the surface of this beautiful aching self that needs to be protected and possibly healed from all the seasons that came before. Wintering is the only way to arrive at the spring of renewal and possibility. Wintering is the period that ends the sentence of the last chapter of a part of your story. There is no looking anywhere but inward. There’s no company to keep but your own. There’s no other song to sing but that of silence. This is how we create fertile soil for the seeds we sow in spring. So it is, so it goes, the mystery and wonder of all our cycles, all the circles cowled in the nest of our beingness season after season after season after season.