Cold November Morning

The sunlight is streaming in low this morning; highlighting the frost on the rooftops even more than usual, calling attention to the contrast and cementing the fact that summer is slowly fading from sight in the rearview mirror.  The arrival of November and tonight’s time change should have been enough notice, but we’ve been busy and the days have slipped past quickly and silently and now we have a moment to take stock and really see where we are.

Where I haven’t been is here, sitting, writing, watching my world as an observer, keeping notes and finding my connection to all things around me.  The reasons are as habitual as they are numerous, but the end result has been a quiet dis-ease that slowly rolls and simmers just enough below the surface to be unremarkable, yet high enough to ripple through at times and call attention to my absence.

I looked back the other day and noticed the last real post I set here for you was Bert’s eulogy post; that’s not the kind of finality I want to leave anywhere just laying around - the trip report installments didn’t feel ‘right’ beside that and so they have since vanished by my hand – they aren’t really where I wanted this to go anyway and so I decided to retract them and let them live where and how they do for me, for us, and they will serve me well there. 

Here I need to be more complete, more grounded, more real – questioning and rambling as I do to make sense of things – this is what I find I crave when I allow life to overtake me rather than being an active participant.  I need to be present in the process – I’d argue we all do – though I’m becoming more convinced that fewer and fewer understand how to do that anymore or why it is crucial to our existence and growth and shared, mutual experience.  It’s a thought I’m keeping active on the back burner for the next little while – a seed of sorts that I hope to germinate with some quiet time and water with further insight and study – and we’ll watch what fertile, green shoots sprout forth over the winter.

Life is changing again – intuitively I know this winter will be something new, something testing me and pushing me in directions I will resist and fight against – my stubborn nature resorting to what it knows best as it attempts to maintain its own reality intact, separate from my true reality – and I will work my way through it and emerge on the other side more complete and with a better understanding of how and why this is supposed to work – this backwardly experienced lesson we are all expected to learn eventually, but are never really prepared for.

The kittens have grown to full cat size now, busy with the intruders who have moved in under the backyard decks, those underground architects of various interconnected holes and tunnels taunting the felines from beneath their feet.  We had to put down the oldest of the three earlier this fall – at17 he reached his wintertime with grace and nobility, still active and alert and in charge – but the body (as they are wont to do) was beginning to give way and fail him and so we made the difficult decision for him and allowed him one last afternoon in the sun and in the flowerbeds before his fate. 

It’s been that kind of year for us. 

And maybe that’s why I’m been away when I really should have been here more.  Maybe I’ve been busy keeping busy, pretending the reality isn’t always just a little bit away over there, hidden enough in plain sight to be familiar, yet distant enough to be forgotten.  Maybe I didn’t have much to say – or maybe I wasn’t ready to say it – or maybe I didn’t know what it was I needed to say. Maybe I’ve been silently waiting to feel ready again, moved to the point where forward is the only way remaining.  Maybe…

The maybes are beginning to unravel themselves into a pile of words at my feet. 

A jumbled collection of ideas and places; fragments of truths and remembrances that need to be knit back into form and given structure so they can stand alone again.  Woven together to embrace and warm me in the cold months ahead as I plow back into life, ready to begin the required heavy lifting and excavation that has become my journey.  Wrapped around and held close on those cold, dark mornings when the shadows and silence surround and sit formless in wait. Worn to protect and comfort me when the light of day retreats, leaving only a flickering flame to guide me.

The sun is higher now, but that frost doesn’t look like it’s ready to release its hold on the rooftops any time soon. We can’t deny it any longer, the cold is settling in.  I’d better get knitting…