Color, Snappy Weather & Flocks of Birds

We interrupt this blogging hiatus for a cross-post on every blogger’s favorite subject: autumn.

I realize that the autumnal equinox was technically on September 22nd this year, but it’s the transition to October that usually seals the deal for me.

While every seasonal change is well and good, and brings with it something new, what I love about autumn is the feeling of shedding – of shaking off the old, letting go of what is no longer nurturing.

(Never fear – I also still love lattes, cozy blankets, anything pumpkin, and all other requisite fall activities and accoutrements.)

I’ve posted it before, but I am drawn back every year to my favorite literary excerpt about autumn, from Kaye Gibbons’ The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster:

Watch me walk, I carry my hands to the sides. I don't lurch or slope. There's not a hunchback dome on my back. I can walk rested in the shoulders and loose armed, or I can walk with dignity, like a queen. After three years here, it's only loose ends left to manage, but when the list of things you have left to do on yourself includes items such as healing from terror that comes and goes and frequently gets in your way, it looks like the large job of work it still is. The good news was I was on the brink of October.

If you think about October's role in the calendar, you'll see it was custom-created to relieve the sensation of unsettledness and the mingling fears and needs that still edged in if I took a brief vacation, and let my mentalities go lax the way people my age who don't have to feel old as vampires have the privilege to do. October promises a difference and brings it, the changes it says are coming always come. When the air crispens, it splurges on symbols, dropping beautiful proof at your feet. It doesn't lie or leave out, saying death will be around eventually but only because life was already here, and here's some color and snappy weather and flocks of birds flying south to allow you to breathe deeply in trust that the universe knows what to do and when to do it. There won't be haywire shocks to wound the sky and shatter down another dose of jagged edges. October knows you've had enough.

Also (because: October.) I feel the need to pay homage to my home state, in which I always find beauty:

"You Run Deep In Me" - Arkansas Department of Parks & Tourism from Jones Film Video on Vimeo.

Here’s hoping the blustery winds blow in some much needed blog inspiration – it’s way too quite around these corners, y’all!