Autumnal Equinox

Loving the Season

“All those golden autumn days the sky was full of wings.  Wings beating low over the blue water of Silver Lake, wings beating high in the blue air far above it…bearing them all away to the green fields in the South.”

                                  Laura Ingalls Wilder

         This week, the sun will cross the equator, headed south, and we will enter into the season of autumn.  The days grow shorter and the nights longer.  The seasons roll on and we roll with them.  I am determined this autumn to take time to savor the changing days rather than rush through them.  After the hottest summer on record, I want to feel the cool air on my face, and listen to the sighing of wind relaxing in the trees.  I don’t want to miss an opportunity to be outside after what has felt like four months of incarceration.  There were days this summer when I longed for autumn and wondered anxiously whether it would be delayed.  But here it is, same as always.  It’s good to know there are some things you can count on, isn’t it?

         We travel through the seasons, and arrive, surprised, back where we started.  T.S. Eliot wrote a poem about that, “Little Gidding.”  The last lines are familiar to us:

                 “We shall cease from exploration

                  and the end of all our exploring

                  shall be to arrive where we started

                  and know the place for the first time.”

         Whatever the season, we come home to ourselves; changed perhaps, somewhat older and, hopefully, wiser, having gained experience and expanded our perceptions.  My favorite memory from the summer: crossing Pamlico Sound on the ferry when leavng Ocracoke Island, and seeing a herd of wild ponies standing in the waves, looking across the water as though judging the distance for a swim.  It was a magical experience that will stay with me all my days. 

         Coming home to self is not a bad thing.  Taking images into the winter to be revisited and cherished is a precious part of living a human lifetime.  Even when we experience the moment with others, as I did, it is still a solitary memory, my own.  It reminds me of the old Crosby, Stills and Nash song, “Love the One You’re With”:

                 “There’s a rose

                  In a fisted glove,

                  And the eagle flies with the dove.

                 And if you can’t be with the one you love,

                 Love the one you’re with, love the one you’re with.”

         And that One would be you, baby!  Give yourself a little autumn love today.

                          Grooving,

                          Jane