"The leaf is still singing..."

Mary Oliver, Write the Year, and Popping Open to Possibilities

Photo by Lucas George Wendt on Unsplash

What can I say that I have not said before?
So I’ll say it again.
The leaf has a song in it.
Stone is the face of patience.
Inside the river there is an unfinishable story
and you are somewhere in it
and it will never end until all ends.

Take your busy heart to the art museum and the
chamber of commerce
but take it also to the forest.
The song you heard singing in the leaf when you
were a child
is singing still.
I am of years lived, so far, seventy-four,
and the leaf is singing still.

—Mary Oliver

The Fall Equinox (which falls on September 23 for this year) is approaching for those reading in the Northern hemisphere. A time to appreciate the year’s harvest and begin the turning inward that this season brings. We warm ourselves by the light of our soul; cozied under sweaters and throw blankets, comforted by warm teas and soups, and the soft support of our Ancestors leaning near.

Watch Nature as the wheel turns and she moves us toward the celebration of fall with the splendor of our own silence. I don’t particularly love the bleakness of February, and I think of that as the Fall asks me to trade flip flops for shoes— and eventually boots. As I prepare to walk around perpetually swathed in wool, I have begun to make better friends with the seasons.

The meditations of Steiner alighted a new appreciation within me: Spring and Summer (I am a summer baby, born on a third quarter moon, said to be one of alchemy and responsibility), we have the warmth of Nature to inspire us; however, in the Fall and Winter, we are asked to draw near the warmth of our inner light and the call of our inner world. Makes sense to be more attuned to the calling toward the inner flame, the inner fire as the temperature arounds us stills the natural world.

That is why tomorrow we start to Write the Year — accessible to our paid subscribers — a gentle calling towards nature’s rhythm, and a practice of appreciation for all that we have traversed in a year, internally and externally, rather than an endless scroll of busy-ness that implies we never have a pace to reach, we only have more to accomplish. Where is the time to savor the sliver of life we have?

“At certain times I seek the strength to confront my own self as a stranger in order to make my own experiences show themselves in a new light.” - Rudolf Steiner

Sometimes when we write, we write time released realizations to ourselves. We trick ourselves into knowing, we pass a note to our own being in class. Sometimes when we are not paying attention we spill the whole truth, only discernible with eyes that are fearless enough to see the clarity. Eyes that have learned to be more curious than critical, and more loving than linear.

It’s all waiting there for you on the blank page, journal (like these gorgeous ones

Multilayered

has with her art on the cover. Or in an open pages document, or the back of a bill envelope — really life is just dying to get your attention. If we are looking for it there are a thousand places to find ourselves and create.

Enjoy! What other choice is there?
Kate