It has been two weeks since I have posted an entry. Too much time has passed. The seasonal changes have, in some ways, gotten the best of me. It's funny how much the weather affects my perspective and the way I look at the world around me. More importantly, I'm always surprised at how my body and mood shift with the weather in ways that I can't always control.
Autumn is definitely settling into the world around me. The leaves are various hues of the season. Bright yellow and orange surround my gaze with scattered brown leaves rattling around on their branches, not yet ready to fall. Inside my body, I am feeling a similar change of hue. The warm fluid energy I felt in the summer is breaking into more scattered and choppy energy. The wind seems to be dominating my state of mind. Drifting thoughts moving through me and floating off and away. I feel ungrounded in many ways, yet still have some level of focus to get me through the tasks at hand. What that has meant is that I was often too scattered to sit here and get an entry into the computer.
In these past two weeks, I have had a variety of great moments that I wanted to delve into here on this page, but unfortunately, those moments have drifted away like so many of my thoughts. The specificity of those moments becoming fragile memories that are just not accessible right now.
I did get the opportunity to go to Boulder last week, which was part of the reason I did not have time to sit down here. It was wonderful to have a chance to see mountains again before setting into the flat tundra of winter here in North Dakota. To experience the seasonal changes in a different place reminded me how each region experiences seasonal change, but there can be wonderful differences based on the geography of the region. The temperature was not that different in Boulder than here, but the visual landscape of the mountains and the aspens were enough to remind me of the unique experience that is autumn.
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| Leaving Boulder, Bolder |
Autumn is the time of harvest, the time of transition, the time of the fall of the leaf.... All these wonderful words for autumn signal the important shift away from external expressions of the world and into the slow turning inward. Autumn prepares us to explore the world that exists and thrives within the dark spaces of rhizomes, seeds, and the deeper undercurrents that are the very foundations of life. I try to remember that as I look at the leaves changing and falling and drying up on the ground. I think I often forget how much I rely on those external indicators to ground my own sense of self. I need to remember that life is always flowing and transitioning. Embracing that can be tough when the world starts to move from vivid technicolor to stark monochromatic hues.
The time in Boulder was helpful both for the change in visual landscape, but also for the conference I attended that was very attuned to self-reflection and introspection. A valuable experience that I'm still absorbing and do not yet feel ready to write about in this context. Nevertheless, it was a time that I'll be mining throughout the winter as I work through the deep dark work that is winter. This time around, I do feel prepared for that rhizomatic journey. In fact, I am excited for it. But first, the work of autumn is still here. It is present in the leaves and branches that I must rake and the bulbs I must plant.
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