quick! look!

and think

what are we doing all day

missing the slow wind

Today’s one of those days where it seems that the weather is battling itself. It’s just warm enough that you’d expect to feel comfortable, yet the wind blows through fierce and foul, an uprising of molecules; some low-pressure rebellion.

I am so affected by spring and fall. The change of season raging in. It’s unlike summer and winter, who seep in slowly, dripping and sneaking. Fall and spring are floods. It happens so quickly and irrationally that you can’t seem to keep up, can’t seem to find solid ground. 

i’ve been setting my thoughts out to sea

sending them away in little sail boats

it’s working

for now i sleep

but always

somehow

they make their way back to me

the tide turns

or the wind changes while i dream

or perhaps they never go away at all

i just forget for a moment

that sea-sickness

I’m sitting watching the first snowfall of the season from the window of the turret in our attic at home. For the first time, quite unintentionally, I took a trip far away and didn’t write a word while I was there. So here I am, attempting to reflect on two weeks spent nearly at the bottom of the world, the farthest I’ve ever been from home. 

The leaves are almost entirely gone, much changed from when I departed. It is the time of the year that I usually despise here in Vermont. The landscape has been robbed of its usual vibrancy, no snow yet to conceal its imperfections. For some reason though, this time around I love it. I love the vulnerability. How everything seems so bare. It is a kind of rebirth in it’s own right; let us strip everything away that we lean on to define us and start all over again. 

It makes me happy to be home. It makes me relish the fact that even though it happens like this every single year, I can share it with my family, with the people that I love. That it is relatable and secure. That we’re all sort of in it together. 

As with almost every trip I’ve taken, I left with the expectation that I would return with refreshed inspiration, that I would come back knowing some new truth about myself or my existence. Yet as always, I instead return with a loss for words, an acceptance that I must not lean on expectation in any circumstance. That the lessons gleaned from such excursions are never immediate. That they might wash over you unexpectedly in the form of a song, or a conversation, or while watching the snow fall on naked trees, their branches raw and exposed.

i can’t say your name without feeling heavy

the moisture in your air has saturated my bones; white and wet, a lukewarm river of marrow

i feel grounded, or perhaps the contrary; anchored to a cloud

or a thunderhead

something so fleeting that i know i’ll look up one day, suddenly, and i will find that i am free

stay true. 

don’t forget what you love.