Falling...

This is the season for it.  My favorite month, my favorite time of the year.  I love the colors, the crispness of the air (even in California, sometimes you just have to enjoy it at night only), Thanksgiving fast approaching, my birthday.  I am not sure there is a time of year when I feel more alive.

I think I have always been better at endings than beginnings.  Not that I don’t enjoy the fuck out of the starts, I guess more, it is all beginnings imply an ending for me.  So when Fall comes, I feel embraced, held, seen.

Letting go is beautiful, not tragic.  The trees hold their leaves all year and then in the Fall, they release them, allowing them to paper the ground, giving richness to the layers of life and living below.  I guess, for me, Fall is the time of year that I become acutely aware of life’s lessons of holding on and letting go.  As humans, we must learn to do both, but the secret to being happy is to trust that all that is being taken is over and all that comes scripted.  It is so nice to be at this place in life where I can allow things, people, and events to land on my open palm.  Trust they shall remain as long as they are meant to and that I will be better for their entry into my life.  And also, I will be fine when they depart...

Falling also brings up the surrender of control.  I have spent so much of my life trying to make things happen, holding onto MY way so tightly.  I find myself now thinking about all the things I missed along the way because I was so hellbent on getting what I thought I wanted.  But here I am years later, living just fine without that person, thing or idea.  Sometimes want and desire are just the catalysts for change, and that is their only purpose.  They were never meant to remain, just to come along and move us into whatever came next.

So funny that I spent so much of my life refusing to let go, to surrender.  But surrender was the only way that I have ever come close to getting the life I want and the feeling that all is right with the world.

Falling, for me, is also about the way the light scatters across the Topa Topa mountains, or a long field of flowers in the valley.  I love the way the light plays at this time of year, rendering everything in this golden hue and tone.  It makes me feel alive in ways that I cannot describe.  A late afternoon stroll with the dog through the meadow or river bottom while the light casts its golden glow brings about a joy in me that is hard to replicate.  The light comes in sideways now, low and unhurried, and it gilds everything it touches. The fence posts, the dog’s ears, the dust floating over the kitchen table. Nothing new has been added to the world, but everything looks like it’s been dipped in honey and set out to dry.  And I kind of love that.

Everything goes gold at four o’clock. The oaks, the gravel, my hands on the steering wheel. As if the day knows it’s ending and wants to be remembered kindly.

And as we move towards Winter where everything comes to an ending so that Spring can bring revival and rejuvenation. I feel myself linger in the golden cast of Fall.  I think I fell for Fall because of the light. It doesn’t come straight at you anymore. It slants and lingers and lays itself across things, and the whole world looks like it’s being seen by someone who loves it. Fall traces slow circles across my body like that of an attentive lover, lazy, unhurried fingerings that leave an indelible mark upon my soul. Maybe that’s what I wanted all along. To be lit up and looked at that way...

“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.” F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Again, still...