 A note: Sometimes, an answer can appear prior to the question. This was such an occasion. I noodled with this piece for a few weeks before having the slightest idea what it was all about. It was finally revealed online, in a "Question for the Road" posed by a friend. The way it appeared to me in accordance with my current interior life was this: In the coming transition from winter to spring, what is being offered from the spirit of nature within and around me to gently suggest that within is also around? It was a beginning... Here in Connecticut, the winter now just departing was uniquely mild. Disquietingly so. There was little snow until the very end, and was rarely cold. The nearby lake never froze over. No ice boats. No ice fishing. Late autumn simply lingered until spring ̶ ̶ winter mostly went missing. Disturbance was in the air. It was enough to make me wonder about the world I thought I’d come to know. The photo above of warmly lit homes across a frozen cove at dusk was taken a couple of years ago, during a deep winter long since given over to all the seasons which followed. But it’s not the winter just passed that has me wondering. Not really. More lately, it’s the giving over, the ever-changing face of temporal life, the fusion of appearances and what is true. During such consideration, I lean toward recollection. *****  During the warm days of summer, I walk beneath a canopy of untouchable, deep forest green in the cool of its shade. Soft ground cushions my steps, and maybe there is even an easy breeze. But it’s the canopy high above and beyond reach that is the truth of summer for me. In it lies its wisdom. Shadow offsets light. Green is the color of my summer thoughts. And then gradually, the days begin to shorten. Light yields to an earlier dusk, warmth eases, and come August the first colors of autumn begin to appear in the green above. The air just begins to dry and clear. In the clearing air a surrender whispers and the canopy’s wisdom is revealed, for it's always known what is to come of it.  Soon, the colors turn away from green, anything but green, and leaves rain onto the soft ground, no longer out of reach, leaves now offered to the fall, and mild summer breezes are given to crisp winds. Now, I walk on the leaves I could never have touched, so I come to love them even more. The coming and going, the all-falling-down. The exacting wind and rain of November strips the tree limbs clean, every single one. Leaves them all barren-gray and brown. Unforgivable. Until the late autumn sunsets backlight those bare limbs, and in blazing smears of salmon, orange, and crimson, a God so beautiful is revealed that I still sink into my heart every time, and a held breath escapes and makes a noise that almost sounds like, Oh. Mere seconds pass, and the sky’s colors wane quickly in the fading glow, given to the night until dawn. How soft and perfect. ***** I remember sitting on a beach in Spain one late spring at the end of an arduous, weeks-long walk, contemplating the violence of big waves as they crashed against rocks and cliffs in a merciless repetition. I imagined them then as voices, each one unique with its own message to be heard. Much harder to hear was the hiss of the foamy backwash, the waves returning to the sea, the crashing answered. It was the first time I came to know of this returning as a giving over, the forgiveness of a wave completed. Exhaled. Inhaled. The broader implications have haunted me ever since.  Farther up the coast from that beach and for several days that followed, I walked on paths carved through scrub brush on the rugged moors atop tall cliffs, always within earshot of the surf below. Some days were summer-warm, sunlit, clear and breezy; others were overcast and gloomy with a windblown chill that foretold of the time beyond summer. And in the midst of this, random, confusing memories of the longer walk kept arriving as if from out of the world itself. The temptation was to press in, to resolve what could have become a great anxiety. But the less I tried to understand, the more I understood, and with the accompanying silence came a wisdom shared by the green summer canopy and those backlit sunsets. For the slightest measures of time, these worldly things and I were one thing, held in a common hand and cherished. So it is in the making way, the yielding, the acquiescence that makes it all so impeccable and so incomprehensible; one thing following another and precisely as it must, devoid of any resistance, yet each new thing loaded with the potential of great meaning. The seasons, the violent waves, seem to agree. So does the light and dark, the warmth, the cold, all the love and all the fear, human desire and soul’s grace, the great confusion and deep understanding. Breathing in. Breathing out. Listening closely now in a season to give over. Comments are closed.
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