09.11.15  There are long shadows which spread across the lawn now at midday.  Sarah and Nick left long shadows when they drove away yesterday.  And, always, there is the long shadow of 9/11.  We are into Autumn now.  I’ve been trying to find a new word for this season–this season which poet, Tom Hennen, says is “so loaded down with beauty it is about to tip over.”  Last night, just before going to bed, I took the lantern to the end of the dock, then turned it off to look up at the stars.  The lake was quiet and still and it was one of those nights where the stars were falling into the lake at the edges.  I watched a satellite go by in its brisk and smooth arc across the sky–it always makes me happy somehow to see one.  Walking back up the lawn to the golden glow in the windows of the house, I thought about the heavy weight of beauty this time of year.

The author of one of my favorite blogs, Posie Gets Cozy, wrote, “I feel the most longing this time of year.”  The word “longing” somehow contains that heavy weight of beauty.  With my family around me, there is the beautiful sense of be-longing, even as I must tell them goodbye at the end of our visits.  In his profound book, Consolations, David Whyte talks about longing as “the transfiguration of aloneness, the defenseless interior core of a person receiving its overdue invitation from the moon, the stars, the night horizon and the great tidal flows of life and love.”  How lovely to think of longing this way, in the “great tidal flows of life and love”.