Fallen

The gray forest people cast off their old clothes

The mists of all twilights dance close at hand

Harvest has lifted the crown from the ground

The song of the seasons brings life to the land

~ Bruce Cockburn - The Fall (excerpts)

Fall is here, we are deep into it, the last of it's brilliant shades drifting to ground. We are tilting into winter. I am learning to live with myself again. I am intermittently happy, anxious, despairing, gleeful, laughing, crying, bored and fully engaged in different moments. I hear that is how we humans are, and the task at hand is to become more of a witness to one's own roller coaster. Watching the cars get loaded up, seeing the people scream and throw their hands up or grip tight to the bar, closing their eyes. I have done both. Neither is right or wrong. Maybe I am learning to trust that the car will come back up the track again - maybe I will get another chance to get it right, make a choice that is grounded. Maybe, as the wisdom of many elders suggests, all the wrong has really been just right after all. 

I am breathing deeply and getting out on the water and hills, waking and being outside before the sun rises and watching the light die beautifully at the end of these shortening days. 

I am admitting that I don't know anything, just like Jon Snow. There was a while there when I thought my job was to know my own heart, and I do, but I also trust that I don't. I have relied on labels too much, bent to the pressure of naming and closing when I could have waited, listened more. Spoken less. There is part of me today that fears that I have lost all my chances, a part that clings to many things past - awaiting the return of something I once promised myself. A wish to erase all the mistakes ever made on my part or anyone else's. I also know that this feeling will change again, as the seasons do. I've never been much of clinger, but now I have had the great fortune (I say this without irony) to have had this human experience. An invaluable one - to become aware of this deep sense of wanting. It will only make me better, and hopefully more fair and more kind. It is the raw material for good prayers.

There is something I started to learn once, before life took over in the way that it does, funnelling me off one course and onto another. It is as if I forgot, at least in part, what it is to be awake. I have not often been one to believe in regret, or shame, but I have come to realize that these are just words that we use to put form to the ephemeral feels that drift in and out of awareness. I recognize these things in my own inner landscape. I can see the ways I have sought to bend myself around what I perceived to be what was wanted of me. All the while forgetting myself, and the perfection and beauty that lies in the uncertainty of the journey.