Home again

While I was out of town the last few days, this golden yellow color crept into my yard. That isn't sunlight on the leaves - it's the leaves themselves. It looks like autumn has started to flow in, like a kind of paint carried in the air and light, getting thicker with each application. Watching it happen makes my body feel a kind of sap rising up into my branches.

This is my season to get ready for "sugaring off" - as with a maple tree, my sap - the richest juices of my innermost self - the sweetness only available at the fall of the year, only ready for harvest in the dark and the cold - my best self begins to rise as the leaves fall to the ground.

It will take me a few days to return to my comparatively new rhythms of quiet and thought and words and ideas. I have been out in the cacophony of airport travel and conference attendance. So many words and so many different energies have covered me with a dense blanket of a summery heat, but now I'm home. And I feel the sap rising.

Here, in this house now empty during the daytime of the thoughts or music of anyone but me, the canopy of branches has opened to the crisp light and deep scents of the autumnal season, and I am ready. I feel it.