Familiar in Fall
So: fall.
My favorite, but I feel like it’s passing me by when it’s right in front of my face. There’s a particular kind of sadness in wanting to belong to something beautiful but watching it will have to do.
This is a familiar feeling: to miss something even when I’m standing in the middle of the dance floor.
So: fall
My favorite. Appreciation has to happen quickly, the flavors of vibrancy change within 24 hours. My leg prevents me from spending as much time underneath those colorful canopies so seeing the blue blue sky and feeling the sun on my shoulders while walking to the gym to do my physical therapy will have to do. Soon those shoulders will be separated from the air by two or three layers of winter clothes. The leaves shed, I add on.
So: fall.
My favorite. It’s not often you can identify the very day something is at its most brilliant. It’s not often you can point to the most colorful something will become and say yes, this is the best hour. It’s a good lever to watch treeline instead of my phone.
So: fall
All this beauty is comes from dying: because the tree is pulling back chemicals from the leaves in order to hunker down for winter. Their essence is being drawn within. Their normal clothes are being discarded for a chance to survive.
But here’s the thing: the trees keep breathing through it. Their leaves are still respiring even as the first stages of colorful death come along.
Fall is dying, winter is death.
So: fall
Showing the colors that were always there but only now revealed. Their adaptation will carry them through the darkness.
They will continue to breathe until their fragile, brittle connection with the branch is severed in a windstorm. The crackling leaf will skate through the air and exhale for the last time before it meets the ground.
So: my own fall.
I should breathe through this change too. All those books about meditation work, damn it. I don’t want them to because I don’t want it to be that simple. Because somehow I still can’t make myself do the simple thing.
To breathe even though my true colors are starting to show.
To respire into a season that is no longer to be tolerated (like heat) but survived (like cold.)
To inhale in the direction of a shift. To exhale whether that shift takes the shape of what I thought it would or not.
