Hunting

It's fall and all over the soft and blurry roundness of summer turns sharp. The light changes a little each day.  It's like someone took a sharpie and outlined all the trees, clouds, flowers, grass.  Overnight in the cold, the flower heads drop their petals and turn black. Their outline against deepening greens and autumn mauve wakes the eye.  It feels a little like a cold shower.  My eyes awash. I love the black blowing on breeze as much as I did the color.

And the sky. Never so blue, bright, and blinding. A small boy sits in his swing eyes cast down and smiling. You can't look directly at the brightness. Like God passing before Moses. Beauty that burns the retinas.

What is it about autumn that marks so precisely the passage of time? Of littles growing bigger? Filling bigger shoes? Moving, always moving, further from their mama.  Needing me less. But running back, arms open wide at the sweetest moments.  The needing and the not needing.  One foot on each side of the door. A liminal space we call that in literature--living at the threshold.

And what about me? Half way to retirement my brother-in-law informed me over the phone just a month ago. Indeed. And have I done all I said I would? Less? More? Just different.  And Ann Voskamp says it most true: "It’s all the things already behind a woman that bring her beauty to the front." Knowing that each birth drains a little more youth, a little more energy. But then instead of in a mirror, we look at the bits of light moving across our daily screen. We see ourselves in them, we see our best and worst.  We see the fruit of what we have given away, spent, and thank God it is richer than our bank account.

Always at this time of year I crave. The views outside are breathtaking...and fleeting. So beautiful, in fact, I'm left wanting more. I stomp my foot for more time than I'm allotted to take the season in.  Here and now is never enough. And there is something in us that knows that though this is much, it is not all.  Beauty and brokenness together leave us hungry. It is fall that reminds us of this truth--season of untamed beauty, herald of cold and dark.

And what do we do with all this? My question lately. An answer might tame the eager restlessness fall brings. Perhaps I am reminded after a season of digging in earth and playing outdoors and watching things grow that there is plenty of work, still. And it is waiting. With what will the hands keep busy in the cold season coming? My hours are never regular, my attire unfixed and usually unkempt.  My charges and duties unchanging (feed, clothe, love, repeat) and yet ever shifting. What shall I do in this season? 

"His Kingdom is Upside Down and in Him your part is large and lovely and needed and art."

I read the words true, steady soul, and carry forward.  It is time to open eyes and take in the gift of now. It is also time to take up work--big tasks and small. We throw ourselves into learning--E at school, A and K at home. We throw ourselves into projects, birthdays, and more time in the kitchen concocting meals that keep the new evening chill at bay. We travel to and from: dance, play group, story hour, pool therapy, school. One thing more I know. In between the small tasks, I need to clear a space for thinking, for making sense of all that's passed over twenty months. That means more solo jogs, more writing just for me, and more time with God.

If I disappear from this space for awhile, it is not by neglect and it is not forever. My littles need and the calendar is full. More, my heart, head, and hands are ready to bring some closure to the great shift in our lives, nearly two years in the making. There's a roundness to life, a raw beauty that I've grown to appreciate. What to make of it? I'm on the hunt, searching the interior spaces while soaking up all fall has to offer.

All this beauty;
You might have to close your eyes
And slowly open wide
All this beauty;
We traveled all night
We drank the ocean dry
And watched the sun rise...

You can ask about it
But nobody knows the way
No bread-crumb trail
To follow through your days
It takes an axe sometimes
A feather in the sunshine
And bad weather
It's a matter of getting deeper in
Anyway you can....

All this beauty;
You might have to close your eyes
And slowly open wide (all this beauty)
And watch the sun rise.

--The Weepies

Gone hunting! Be back...

Happy Fall!