The Shift

Can you feel it? The change in the air, the light, creature behavior and growing things? This morning I can feel that change in the seasons, it feels at once welcome and sweet but also a bit sad and quiet. It’s the feeling of seeing a friend off at the airport after a welcome visit, it was so lovely but it’s over again…for now. Or the end of a really great novel, you loved it so much and of course it ends, you have the satisfaction of having engaged with it and it was amazing but you now close the cover and put it on a shelf, a little sad that your time in that world, with those characters is over.

This morning, as I took my daily walk the air just smells different, it’s a bit cooler out there, there’s a stiff ocean breeze and the flowering plants that were so prolific only a short couple months ago have now gone to seed, their elongated weedy bodies bending to the earth.The crow babies are now teenagers, gangly and molting, messy and flying in raucous youthful groups, parents have done their jobs. The grass in the park has taken on that golden, crisp August color and feel and some of the first leaves and seed pods are dropping down to the ground.

I feel both excited by the turn of the wheel, how connected I feel to this season and its vitality but there is also an ennui. Remember when we were kids? We would be brown as berries, our hair wild and overgrown, dirty shorts and t-shirts and three different tan lines from a summer spent at the lake, the beach or the river. You had this feeling of wanting to eak out every last bit of the freedom you had left before school began. There was a desire to stay wild, free but an excitement and what was to come…new friends, fresh school supplies, seeing that boy you had a crush on.

This is the time of year my mom would start trying to get us “back on a schedule”, to bed when the sun was still up and birds still singing. Fresh haircuts would be on the agenda and the inevitable school shopping trips, for clothes, supplies and lunches. Funny that I’m approaching 60 and this is still the feeling of this pivotal time between summer and autumn. 

So, we shift again, connected to mama nature and her cycles. the waning light and crispness of morning, the ochre shades replacing bright yellows and reds, and coming, once again of the dark time of the year, when she sleeps and we go inside.