In times like these, I enjoy the mid-autumn sunshine. The trees now shed of their light-hungry leaves, let brightness again seep to the porous earth’s floor. The naked branches bring back views of the mountains, unveil the cedar waxwings and robins swarming the crabapples in their lust for ferment, and let sounds roll uninterrupted across the valley floor and across me, too.
It seems that, only when there is snow in the mountains does the sunshine lift me highest as it does in mid-autumn. That juxtaposition of winter’s edging deep sleep with the echoes of the year’s warmth, brings a mellow cascade of calm. It is the calm of a cup of hot tea one holds while hearing the storm roll past just outside, just beyond smoke-bellowed chimneys. That peace of mid-autumn sunshine, though, is only a single note in the chorale of the day here, and season still churning forward unto ultimately itself again.
In times like these, I can look forward to other subtle peaces yet on their way, each their own a marker in time, a fruit on the year’s own bough, a rung at once both descending into winter, and back up into spring.
How the first big snow constricts the world gently, a cotton cocoon, perpetuating the life held muffled beneath its firmament. Metamorphosizing. Shifting. Becoming.
How the heavy clouds begin to sink to the valley floor, letting us for just one season keep the same company without wings. In them we realize concurrent confusion of feet upon the ground and our heads in the clouds. Perhaps in that bending of worlds our dreams begin to germ like the very seeds held in the darkness of the world’s soil.
How the darkness allows our afternoons to sleep, for us to dream while awake, and for the world to radiate its own light back skyward through the bright nights of snowladen grounds. It is within the shroud that the other radiant stars can appear and remind us with silent fortitude of the days behind, and the days ahead, and, if we choose to see it, the promise of this season’s peace felt in the warmth of the mid-autumn sunshine.
