Descent

 There is something about this time of year. As the sun lowers itself across the darkening horizon, I am reminded of it. Suddenly this week I am feeling into the melancholic and reflective drift of fall. I have been so happy this past year, for many reasons - all of which are profoundly ordinary. There have been no lightning bolts of synchronicity, no mad love or material windfalls, just a slow unfolding of mundane and beautiful circumstances that have supported my wellbeing. 

This evening I sat in a chair on the driveway, three of us watching the sheep we had set loose to trim the grass on the edges of the pavement. Drinking beer and laughing about the personalities of our small flock. The small sounds of their grazing, soft noses picking out the best bits of clover, the quiet cropping of green grass. When they first arrived a few months ago the ewes shied away from us at the smallest movement, but now they will clamour and bleat at the gate for handouts and scratches. I give them the carrot tops my new horse friend won't eat.  

This year has been punctuated and populated by shed building, the arrival of 21 tiny chicks, 5 sheep, newly planted garden beds, first eggs, and a feeling of intense contentment. Over the summer I spent the better part of two months floating on the Pacific - a trip that started and ended at the beach at the end of my road. An adventure long anticipated that took a shape not quite so symmetrical as originally conceived, but still perfect in its own way. A gift of time and freedom in a strange year. I had to tear myself away from this new home when I left in June. As these things tend to work, I had to tear myself back out of the addictive rhythm of expedition life to return to this settled way of being. But now I am fully returned. Kimik the dog and I wander out the door in the mornings, out the back gate into a forested trail network that could take days to fully explore. 

I have frequently found myself looking around my life marvelling how nothing at all seems to be missing. There is no hole to fill. Even though I am on my own, I do not feel alone. I was struck by a feeling of belonging, community and connection when I returned home this summer. Loneliness is a feeling, not a true state of being, it is a trick of the mind. I sometimes catch myself wondering if there is something wrong with this state of contentment - is wrong to feel so fulfilled by such simple things? To be so intensely at ease and at home. 

And so the rains have come. Beating against the tin roof of my small bungalow, reminding me that with the slow descent into winter comes a comfort hard to find in the intense glare of summer. There are moments I can feel my body and mind rebelling against the lack of sun, the early darkness. But  I also welcome this quiet moody season, and I am not afraid of the dark.