The weather's gone schizo and can't seem to make up its mind what season to be in, but today it's cool and gloomy and the high this week is scheduled to make it to 86 or so with quite a bit of rain and another front coming through on Thursday. Autumn. It's in the wind, the rain. Go outside and taste it every time you breathe.
Such a paradox, Autumn. It's life in death. All the rain has made the lawns and flowers come alive, and there's something vivifying in the air, but it's an exhalation, not an inhalation.
There are cooler weather, lots of birthday parties, new seasons of TV shows, my favorite clothes, and Halloween candy. There are wonderful memories. And there are also very unpleasant ones. Autumn is emotionally heavy and edged with the ache of loss. It's the Witching Season and the Weeping Season and the season of looking in and the season of looking back.
As they say, you can't step in the same river twice; each year that Autumn turns around again I find I'm a slightly different person in a slightly different place.
Almost ten years ago at a job I hated, I got a small pothos ivy that eventually grew to five feet long on either side. When I took it home I placed it on what would become my altar to the God, and for years it grew on top of my entertainment center as the focal point of that altar. I've never been able to keep plants alive, but this one thrived for a long, long time.
This past year it started dying. Strand by strand of the ivy turned yellow, then brown, and shriveled. I trimmed it back to the pot to help it retain energy, and finally changed the soil and fertilized it, but still, one leaf at a time, it died.
There is one leaf left. I can't say whether I want it to survive or not. That ivy is a deeply layered symbol of my past, and I think it's time for me to start over with a new plant, perhaps even in a different pot. The timing of its death is not lost on me.
There are a lot of things in my life that are coming to a head--nothing external, really, but changes that have been on a slow burn for, in some cases, years. My Saturn return is about to officially end and I can feel the energy of my life shifting, as it has been an inch at a time for months now. I feel like a cycle that started when I turned 30, that frightening night and the upheaval that followed, is completing this year, and whoever I've been has only been the barest shadowed edge of who I'm starting to become.
Maybe in a couple of months I'll have some idea what all of that means.
arr i remember Saturn returning phase, it *ponders* was in all ways the beginning of the tempering of Polly, so many changes, and deepening of who i am, and becoming more who i truly am...
now that i am 39, these changes are still happening as they are wont to do, but they are somehow more tempered, ...
hmm.. *ponders more*.. of course it is spring in New Zealand currently, thus the beginings of growth of the seeds sewn 6 months go.. *smiles*
*twirls around*
Posted by: Pombagira | October 12, 2009 at 01:12 PM
Stunning, vivid, lyrical. I love your take on autumn - you captured its essence beautifully.
Transformation is breathless, isn't it?
Posted by: Rebecca | October 14, 2009 at 10:57 AM