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“Ecclesiastes was onto something,” i wrote, as i dove into a meditation on the notch-by-notch turning of the dial, the dance between heaven and earth that is the shifting of season, as one fugue surrenders to another and another, over and over and over again.

and here we are again, at another cusp. the autumnal equinox. tonight (or, rather, tomorrow morning in the wee wee hours) at 10 minutes to 2 here in the heartland, central time zone.

in my musing on seasons, in the pages of that latest little book of mine, the book of nature, i prattled on a bit longer. . .

“Each season, in four quarter turns, brings forth its own headlines. There’s the yin and yang of spring, the season of exodus and resurrection, of equal parts heartbreak and magic. ‘The fizz and the roar of the land coming back to life again,’ is how Robert Macfarlane brilliantly captured the vernal animations. There’s summer with its invitation for indolence, for taking it slow, savoring, all but licking your plate of its succulence. And autumn, the season that changes its tense, is letting-go time, the beginning of burrowing in, when the shadow grows longer and sunlight goes amber, when half the globe is stripping to its essence, revealing its unadorned spines. Then there’s winter, the stillest of all, when deep-down stirrings are all but invisible, and we learn to keep faith. Sometimes I think God couldn’t decide which channel was best, so the heavens kept jabbing the clicker.

“It’s a wonder reel that never ends, yet never truly repeats—a koan for the ages.

“I often contemplate the geometries of time, how the year is not an inescapable circle, a shape that would get us nowhere, but rather it’s a spiral, and from one winter to the next we’re never the same, always ascending, closer to the holiness we were meant to be—or so that’s the hope and the plan, anyway. Maybe that’s why God keeps this seasonal show on autoplay: maybe God knows how dense we are in the figuring-it-out department, how some of the lessons we need to review. Over and over and over again. Most especially at the fraying hems of the seasons when the doubt begins to creep in, the fear that we’ll never be loosed from whatever it is that tangles and knots us, and God needs to show us those few immutable threads: Resurrection comes. Quiet must follow exuberance. So too dormancy. Surrender to earth’s holy rhythms, the very ones that pull the tides and the flocks, paint the woods, star- stitch the night sky. Expect heartbreak. Await healing. Start all over again.

“’The seasons are our scripture text,’ writes Celtic spiritualist Christine Valters Paintner. ‘This earth we are riding keeps trying to tell us something with its continuous scripture of leaves,’ echoes William Stafford, a poet and pacifist who referred to himself as ‘one of the quiet of the land.’ To the ancient Celts, the unfolding of the seasons read as ‘gospel without haste.’ And Walt Whitman, America’s latter-day Homer, put something of a military spin to it when he wrote that ‘nature marches in procession, in sections, like the corps of an army.'”

i prattle on a few pages more. but i’m already thinking anew about seasons. life, when we’re paying attention, comes in all sorts of seasons. some, clocked by the sun. some, by the tumults and percolations from deep down in our hearts and our souls.

the season of my soul that i’ve been dwelling in all these past months is one that opened in mystery, back when every day was bringing another scan, another long wait, another doctor’s uncertainty. then, when the surgeon finally extracted the answer, “it’s cancer,” i landed in shock and bewilderment. and ever since i’ve been encountering an underworld, a sometimes murky, sometimes brilliantly glistening world potholed with reams of unanswered questions and populated by fellow travelers who nearly always, uncannily, know just what to say and just what i’m thinking. it’s those fellow travelers who have thrown me life rope after life rope. just when i begin to feel the walls closing in, one of them pings me with hope. or pure simple kindness. or laugh-out-loud irreverence (eileen N i am looking at you!).

one thing i know, which i am going to be thinking about for a long time to come (and trying desperately to put into words), is how love truly is a magnetic force field all its own. i can be teetering at the edge of some quicksand-y bog, and all of a sudden, out of the blue, kindness will come. and kindness, love’s gentle sister, can shatter the darkness to shards. kindness makes you not all alone. kindness holds your hand and squeezes it so tightly it won’t let you dangle. or drop. or run out of air.

just this week, a brilliant brilliant poet friend of mine sent me a note. and it might have been one of the wisest, kindest, gentlest things i’ve read in a long time. he wrote:

“You have spent a lifetime thinking and feeling deeply. In my experience of living like that, I’ve found that pains are more painful and joys more joyful. I think it also means that you are better able to face the sort of scary stuff you’re now facing. I hope that your lifetime of thinking and feeling deeply gives you the strength to deal with this face-to-face…whatever ‘this’ ends up being.”

and so, my prayer as i look to my first post-surgical scan in the weeks just ahead, is that i begin to move now into a season where the edges aren’t so raw, and the fears aren’t quite so suffocating. there is love all around, and i know it will save me. no matter what comes.

tell a story of a kindness that saved you.

the apple slices above, already doused in caramel-y bath, are my sweet line cook’s first attempt at pie baking. his slicing alone impressed the heck out of me. just a month into the job at one of chicago’s finest eateries and the kid is picking up tricks. and pie recipes too. pretty sweet living at our house.

may this autumn, season of awe, of turning in and deepening, enrobe you in the brilliance you reach toward….

and a big giant thank you to each and all of you who have lavished me with kindnesses and love in this long season now turning…

p.s. i’m writing this from a hotel in ohio where tonight, squeaky squawky voice and all, i am getting up to a podium and giving a keynote address on the blessed book of nature…

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September 20, 2019

autumn is the season that begs your attention

curdle-clouded autumnal sky

enter into this open oak woodland

queen anne’s lace, autumn’s finest crewel work

All creation holds its breath, listening within me,
because, to hear you, I keep silent.

~ Ranier Maria Rilke ~

i’m deep breathing poetry and wisdom at the 2019 Catholic Imagination Conference in downtown chicago, a biannual sacred-infused assemblage this year drawing a roster of glorious writers including alice mcDermott, tobias wolff, patricia hempl, mary gordon, paul elie, and poets mary szybist, paul mariani, and dana gioia, and more and more to the shores of lake michigan. this year’s biennial is subtitled: “the future of catholic literary tradition,” a subject to which i am curiously drawn. while i’m off inhaling all that these wise ones offer, and as the seasons take their pivot, exuberant summer into majestic autumn, i am leaving here at the table the longer, unedited version of something i once wrote: a count-your-blessings calendar for autumn, the season of awe, the season that begs your deepest attentions. in all, there are four weeks in my blessed-be autumnal calendar, but i might leave two here now, and circle back with the next two later in the season. (on the other hand, i might leave the whole thing here now…)

an abridged version of this is found on pages 134 to 138 of Slowing Time, my first foray into the world of book publishing, a book that still sells at a slow and humbling trickle. (though not as humbling as the next two…) delight in making this the backdrop to your hours of quietude in the shimmering weeks ahead. i find i can’t ever wrap myself enough in the velvety folds of this turn in the year…

A Count-Your-Blessings Calendar: Blessed be Autumn, Season of Awe…*

In the Christian calendar, Ordinary Time continues, punctuated with Feast Days, All Saints’ and All Souls’, chief among many. Advent comes as autumn turns toward winter. We kindle lights amid the blanketing darkness. We await the Holy. In the Hebrew calendar, harvest time brings the Days of Awe, the holiest of holy days, from Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year to Yom Kippur, Day of Atonement, and on to Sukkot, Feast of Tabernacles, the harvest celebration where we wrap ourselves in the whole of Creation and God’s abundant glory. From the golden glowing autumn light to the morning’s brisk first breath, this is indeed the Season of Awe.

Week One:

Day 1: Blessed be the golden days and star-stitched nights of autumn. Blessed be triumphant blast of light and jewel-toned tapestry, as the Northern Hemisphere lets out its final hallelujah before deepening, drawing in. And bless those among us who are wide-eyed to the wonderment that is ours for belly-filling feasting.

Day 2: Now’s the interlude when leaves drop their drab summer-worn green for jaw-dropping amber and gold, copper and crimson. Air turns wake-me-up chilly. Pumpkins weigh down the vine. The slant of sun drops in the sky, as we twirl farther and farther away, it is all autumn’s call to attention.

Day 3: Season riddled with goodbyes: Winged flocks take flight on night winds. Hummingbirds hover but an instant. The hearts and souls we love shove off, back to school desks and leafy college quads. Bittersweet the partings, filled with prayer for safe return.

Day 4: There is faith galore in tucking in a bulb, concentrated life. In setting it just so, roots poking down and the shoot facing skyward, where the vernal sun will come, will tickle it awake, coax it from the frozen earth, break through unannounced, startle us with tender slips of green. Resurrection, sealed beneath the earth.

Day 5: Wrap yourself in the prayerful cry of the cello, the orchestra’s autumnal offering. No deeper plea for hope than Bach’s Cello Suite No. 5 in C Minor, especially as unspooled by Yo-Yo Ma. Might it be the backdrop to your autumn prayer?

Day 6: Behold the piercing, minor-key dissonance, raining from on high. It’s the trumpet blasts of geese in Vs, far above the trees. In this season of migration, as feathered flocks follow heaven’s call, let us bow our hearts when we hear the mournful siren’s song.

Day 7: English poet and polemicist John Milton says of geese: They are “intelligent of seasons.” Contemplate that wisdom when next you absorb the snow goose’s unseen night cry.

Week Two:

Day 1: Some call this “the wabi-sabi season,” so defined as the season that pulses with the beauty of sadness and the sadness of beauty, and the breathtaking poetry of imperfection and impermanence. Embrace your own wabi-sabi self.

Day 2: Be on the lookout for the first frost of the autumn, the glass-beaded luminescence that captures the slant of the sun, refracts it, refines it. Wraps it in a ball, makes it more than it was, broadcasts it. When first frost comes — when the architecture of water and cold finds itself frozen — that morning light is magnified, glorified, held up for ovation, a show that won’t last. It’s all part of the whole-cloth majesty that is the autumn.

Day 3: Holy chores of autumn: Head outdoors to chatter with your birds and squirrel friends. Protect them from the coming cold. Toss corn. Pour water into shallow bowls. Smear peanut butter onto tree bark so they can peck it off, stave off the shivers and the rumbly tummies that we fear for them.

Day 4: Partake of autumn’s poetic fruits: honeycrisp apple, mission fig, pomegranate, persimmon, ruby-breasted pear, quince.

Day 5: Bless the miracle of the monarch, the one of all the 24,000 species of butterflies who migrates the farthest. And whose story brings on goosebumps. For most of the year, the monarch, like every other butterfly, lives an ephemeral life. It’s born, and within weeks, it dies. Not so the monarchs of autumn, they are the Methuselah generation — named for the oldest old man of the Bible, who, according to Genesis 5:27, lived “nine hundred sixty and nine years.” Monarchs born at summer’s end, way up in Canada, live as long as eight months. They exist for one purpose: To fly south, and, come spring, beget the next generation. Who in heaven’s name dreamed up such almighty wonder?

Day 6: Crack open the autumnal recipe box. Bake a crisp or crumble that draws upon the orchard’s harvest. Offer up a prayer for heirloom apple tree, and the woodsman who tended it, and plucked its drooping boughs.

Day 7: Fill the table with invited friends, friends whose big ideas soar like kites against the wind, and whose laughter makes the walls shake. We are blessed with such companions, a word with Latin roots meaning, literally, “bread fellows.”

Week Three:

Day 1: Bless the season of winged flight, of thousands of miles of flapping wings. Of painted-wing songbirds carrying off their full-throated melodies and charmed warblings, leaving us to absorb the new-found silence of the leafless trees.

Day 2: It is in the few fat fruits — American cranberry, rosehips — left on the bough and thorny stem, and the up-reached arms of oak and serviceberry that we might find the combination lock to our imagination — and our most satisfying comfort.

Day 3: Treat yourself to a mid-night’s moon lace. Tear off the bedclothes, tiptoe to a window — or if you’re feeling brave, straight out to under heaven’s dome. On a night when the moon is full or nearly so, behold the full-strength moonbeams as they spill across the boughs, the grass. All the earth is dappled in inside-out shadow. Better than Chantilly, and sure to take your breath away.

Day 4: Savor the gray days of late autumn. When all the world is stripped of excess, pared back to strictly elemental. When even a smidge of color — save, maybe, for the blood red of a clump of berries — is uncalled for, unnecessary.

Day 5: Regard the autumn frost, redux. Miracle of sunbeams captured in wee globes of dew. Or might it be the cold sweat of dawn’s labor, the hard work of night turning to day? Either way, let it take your breath away. First blessing of the day.

Day 6: Unearth a long-buried tome from your bookshelf, and curl up for a long afternoon’s contemplation. What title tickles your autumnal fancy, and gets you in the mood for counting all your bounty?

Day 7: Dollop sweetness, the gifts of summer’s labor harvested in autumn. Might you choose amber-liquid honey, or bronze molasses? Or do you take your sugar squared, in lumps? Heaped blessing, indeed.

Week Four:

Day 1: The world is at work in its tasks that trace back to the birth of all time. There was darkness, there was light. Genesis says so. There are seasons, turning. Ask Ecclesiastes.

Day 2: Look out into tangled labyrinth of branch on branch — interrupted only by unkempt knot of leaves assembled by some squirrel intent on keeping warm — and understand what November reveals.

Day 3: As you begin kindling wicks, come nightfall, consider the honeybees’ hard labor to beget the beeswax. It’s estimated that, to gather the pollen to make the honey that’s consumed by bees to craft the honeycomb, the bees fly 150,000 miles to yield one pound of beeswax.

Day 4: Or, as Bavarian thinker named Karl von Leoprechting wrote, in 1855: “The bee is the only creature which has come to us unchanged from paradise, therefore she gathers the wax for sacred services.” Ponder that when next you strike a match to illuminate the darkness.

Day 5: These are the days when the stark poetry of gnarly branch and endless sky open up to us. When all around is naked, bared, stripped of its cloak, exposed. We might be spurred to pare away all but our very essence.

Day 6: It is jagged silhouette against the charcoal sky that haunts, rustles us, seeps slowly deeply in.

Day 7: “If the only prayer you said in your whole life was ‘Thank you,’ that would be enough.” — German philosopher and mystic Meister Eckhart (1260 – 1328).

what would you add to your own count-your-blessings calendar for this season of deepest awe?