pull up a chair

if i were truly of the prairie, rooted into its undulating loam, rather than a citizen merely plopped here by geography, because it’s the place i call home, i’d know the turning of the celestial wheel and its interplay with earth as robustly as the marrow that courses my bones. alas, my knowing is fainter than that. and yet, still, each september i feel it. the angle of light shifts, and the lens does too. it’s amber now, or so i seem to imagine. the days are drenched, more and more, in molasses hue. and the air holds a chill one minute, a warming the next.

the season itself is playing meteorological tug-of-war: do we want to let go? do we want to surrender? or shall we hang on with the last of our oomph?

ah, but the signs, they abound. and they quicken my spirit, each and every one. the school bus sightings, for one. they lumber the streets now, that slow serpentine crawl, disgorging couplets of children at most any corner. i’m detached from the school calendar now. it’s merely there at the edge of the frame. but, nonetheless, i notice.

my cooking’s changed too. i simmered this week. slow stirring a vegetable stew. i spent a good chunk of hours stationed by the stove, overseeing allium play sidekick to eggplant, to pepper. offering up its essence to add just a pique to the whole.

but mostly i feel the turning of earth in the garden, the plot that keeps me most rooted in the wonder, the majesty, the undying wisdom that is the sacred whole of creation. i felt it in the proliferation of spider webs, those silken geometries of arachnid architectures. the uncanny way the eight-legged thing knows to construct its trapping, and in the process makes beauty of pace-pausing proportion. i felt it in the crisping of blooms, and the heads of hydrangea and black-eyed susan starting to droop, the weight of their long season now taking its toll. a last gasp before death.

i hear it just now in the distant cloudcall of the goose, threading the sky, signaling autumn. it’s a cry that can shroud me in goosebumps. a call to prayer if ever there was.

september is when i feel myself beginning to curl like the nautilus, inward spiral, expanding the chambers within. making room for the quiet, the sacred, to come.

thirty some years into a spiritually-braided marriage, i know september to be the season of awe. quite literally. liturgically speaking. we are in the hebrew calendar’s month of elul, counting the days till the high holiness of the jewish new year. according to jewish tradition, it is the month for contemplating the question, “how should i live the existence that i am.”

just the other day, i –– along with a rabbi i love and a gathering of women –– walked to the water’s edge, recited three blessings, and dropped into the water, into the great lake michigan. it was a cleansing, a beginning anew, a rite of purification. it was a mikveh, an ancient ancient tradition that is symbolically a turning of the page.

the question at the core of elul, “how should i live the existence that i am,” is one that especially quickened for me in a paragraph i read this week that had little to do with religion, and everything to do with the holiness of how we live our lives. it was the beginning of a review of a children’s picture book, and it was written by one of the high priestesses of everyday cultural commentary, maria popova.

she was writing about kamau & zuzu find a way, an “uncommonly soulful” story of a little boy and his grandmother who, somehow, find themselves living on the moon.

popova begins her essay this way:

The astonishing thing is that not one human being who ever lived has chosen the body, brain, place, or time to be born into, and yet in the narrow band of freedom between these chance parameters, we must find a way to live lives of substance and sweetness. Chance deals the hand and we must play it, and in how we choose to play it lies the measure of who we are.

“we must find a way to live lives of substance and sweetness.

“chance deals the hand and we must play it, and in how we choose to play it lies the measure of who we are.”

those are the questions i shall carry into my fading garden, and under the dome of a sky now rife with the cries and the calls of the flocks flying as one, in the migrational river that carries them faraway home.

in the quiet of your own soul, that’s the question for today: how do you choose to play the hand that chance has dealt you? what will be your sweetness and your substance?