Change and Transformation
F
all hangs thickly in the air, threatening to take away the innocence of summer. There is just something about the crunch of the leaves underfoot as I make my way through little side streets with overhanging branches that spill their leaves onto the street that confirms my existence. This time of year makes me yearn for simmering and hearty beef stews to warm the bones. In the fall, I go for a lot more walks, putting on sweaters that are beaded with fuzz like memories holding on to the last flickers of summer.
I feel more alive at this time of year. Maybe it is the chill in the air that lets me know that I am alive. I can feel fall and its muted colors as surely as I can feel the chill in the air. It is the only season that I can feel in my bones--down to the moodiness. In the autumn, I feel more grounded - like I can carve out my life and hold it in the palm of my hands and make it tangible.
As I look to the season for inspiration and observation, my words inside tend to flow a little better and I write with more vigor. Sitting at the window, I contemplate and reflect, and my words are tossed up into the air, and they come tumbling down like falling leaves, floating and whirring as the breeze whips them into some form of semblance. My words seem to be full and fat and come from a place of transformation and newness.
Fall is back to school, back to work, back to basics. Remember those fickle summer romances we had as teenagers that were electric and fleeting like a sudden summer thunderstorm? When the summer was over, we went our separate ways because we had to get back to our perspective places in life. And for awhile we held onto those feelings much like the flickers of summer that somehow still clings to September.
Fall signals the next phase. It's about change and transformation and the natural process of things. No where is that more evident than in the changing of the leaves. We go from bright greens to muted oranges, reds and browns that eventually fall away, shedding all that has been in preparation for renewal.
Fall is about letting go and getting back on that path--the time to bury past mistakes and let disappoints fall to the ground along with the severed leaves. For me fall holds the promise of things to come because I know with death, inevitably, comes rebirth. And that is as sure as the movement of the sun across the sky.
Copyright 2008 © Dawn Prince. Not to be reprinted without expressed permission.
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