Weaving The Dream

Autumn…makes a double demand.  It asks that we prepare for the future—that we be wise in the ways of garnering and keeping.  But it also asks we learn to let go…” Bonaro W. Overstreet in Meditations for Women.

Living in the northeastern part of our county, I’ve always loved autumn because of the intensity and clarity of color that the season brings.  The air is crisper, less humid, so the sky is a metal-bright bowl of blue arching over me.  Sugar maples are show-offs in their bright shifts of orange and red, especially next to the deeper, quieter black-greens of the pines.  Wild asters and grapes compete to define purple.

While reveling in the elixir of color that autumn brings, I can’t help but hear the footsteps of winter approaching, reminding me that all this piercing bright beauty will not last.

Just as the sugar maples and oaks let go of their leaves to make ready for their deep sleep beneath winter’s blanket, I am challenged to let go as well—of the weeding I didn’t complete, the plants I never planted, the vacation I didn’t take, the creative projects I didn’t finish, some I haven’t even started.

Autumn has also been a time of letting go of those I love.  My mother died 24 years ago this past September.  My paternal grandfather died six weeks after her.

And early yesterday morning, as the day was just being born, as leaves dropped silently and unseen in the night, I lost a sister of my heart—author, writer, and teacher, Liz Aleshire.  Liz was (and how hard to use past tense in this sentence) a woman of great courage and determination, of bright intelligence and wit, of fierce loyalty and friendship.  We’ve only been close friends for about seven years, but we traveled many creative and spiritual roads together.  It is hard to say goodbye.  To release our clasped hands.  To know she is no longer just a phone call away.  That she will never again sit on my patio looking out over our yard, smoking a cigarette while our dog, Duncan, keeps her company.

This is the challenge of autumn.  In the other seasons there is a looking forward to new growth, to warmth, to harvest.  In autumn, we look back, not forward, with the desire to spin out time, to slow the relentless fall of leaves, to push back the dark that arrives earlier and earlier each day.

But we can’t do it.  We can’t stop the trees from letting go of their leaves, we can’t slow the earth in its path around the sun.  We can’t stop Death in her tracks.

So we put mulch in the flowerbeds and stack wood for the woodstove, raising our heads to the sound of honking Canada geese as they wing their way to warmer climes. 

I whisper goodbye to Liz as she heads for her own Summerland of sunlight and flowers, where Nathan, her son, waits to greet her with both arms spread wide, laughter in his eyes and voice.

And my tears fall with the leaves.