I always find there to be something quite existential about this time of year. Perhaps it’s a cellular memory of ancient harvests, knowing that the light is beginning to leave. Or some migratory creature instinct that stirs somewhere mostly forgotten but still tracks the tilt of the earth. Or it could be that we are all collectively facing crises and the currency of hope is dwindling even in some of the most relentlessly devoted. Regardless, I find there is beauty in the morbidity of summer ending, and witnessing the gradual cascade of fertility waning. The equinoxes are a balancing of dark and light, and a turning toward the cosmic scales here on earth.
There is a holy pause here, a transition between the seasons, a harvest, and a reckoning with where we are in space and time. In the northern hemisphere, autumn is the death march. A gorgeous dance of colorful decay that ushers us toward the chill of winter. And this year, for me, it is a season of loneliness and a delicious melancholic boiling soup of feeling.
Have you ever watched a dog try to make a nest to lie down and fall asleep in? You know, when they fuss and scratch and turn in circles until they finally lay down with a big huff like they’ve given up and the comfort they are trying to create is impossible? So they lay down defeated like they’ve simply settled for what is. Only to immediately get back up and do it all over again.
That’s me right now. In a city I don’t know, in a bed that is not my own, in a life I only vaguely recognize because it is still full of familiar faces and well, it’s still me. Still my life. I’ve been in the inquiry of my own belonging (again for the umpteenth time because this is a lesson that keeps on giving).
I know, (I KNOW) it’s an experience of being. I belong to myself, yes. And I belong, period. And so do you. I’ve worked damn hard for that to be the thing that hums inside my bones so that I can relax into it. But what do you do when you find yourself once more untethered, in a cycle of unknown amorphous haze of movement and change and the sobering responsibility of building something for yourself and for your little pockets of this world that is beautiful. Because that’s the only thing that makes any sense to me these days. Beauty. Being touched by it, seeking it, and feeling it peeking out through heartbreak.
I cry on the phone with my friend Karolina. She is thousands of miles away from me, but for a moment I am laying in bed next to her while I unravel and she offers me gentle heart reminders for this moment in time. But mostly she just offers me her heart and the kind of love that makes me laugh inside of grief. Thank god for deep soulful women. We meet in that beauty I seek, the kind that destroys us and puts us back together.
I am without a car right now, purposely because I am in a city and I can walk to everything I need. I could have borrowed or rented, but I chose to have one less thing to be responsible for and because I don’t know, I’m trying to have a smaller footprint or something. Ironically, all I want to do is escape the city and run to the coast so I can plant myself on a cliff and finally breathe with the expanse of the ocean before me.
But instead I walk. Miles and miles every day. Something in my creature body needs to sniff and see and orient like that same dog trying to make a nest, but now exploring a new place. I love the hours around dusk because I can still walk in the light but the houses are lit and I can peer in like the little voyeur I am and glimpse a vignette of someone’s life and assess their decor and create stories of who they are. I am studying how people live, as though it will spark some inspiration for this next chapter I’m writing. Mostly I feel disenchanted, because the nest isn’t right and won’t be for some time.
I ask myself about the balance of belonging, how much is practice, how much is place and people. And how much is that bone deep knowing that can simply exist, regardless of any of the latter? We are in Libra season after all, the middle path, and I toe the line between hermitage and emergence.
And maybe that’s just what many of us are doing right now, unglamorously, unendingly navigating where we are in the larger landscape of seasonal change. There is no right formula for this, sometimes simply a full bellied acknowledgment is enough. A simple, “that happened, and now we’re here” that helps us digest the meal of two seasons past before we lay down in our nest. The earth’s ushering of our own passages, and respite from a very fiery year of unrest. Equinox blessings, y’all.
