Autumn is coming to a close.

I would like this. Everything about it....one day.

The sunlight is beautiful now; its becoming winter light, but because we haven't had snow yet, there is still life that you can see and feel in the grass and the trees. I love the solid, clear blocks of sun that come with such clarity, neat and geometric as life settles down because the harvest parties in the woods are being replaced by gentler discussions inside our homes.

Everything is getting colder and harder and I look forward to the soft acoustic of snow. Its easy to romanticize, easy to forget how the ice comes too, and how it melts and mixed with dirt to become wet, sloshing mud.

But we aren't there yet. Winter is on its way, yet late November crispness still gives the fallen leaves a skeleton (the snow will make them limp and flat) as they are tossed everywhere by strong winds. Green still spreads across the ground like an aging carpet and like everything else it has some grey around the edges. Frost comes in the mornings too, glorious spiked crystals of white helping the world get used to the cold before December finally comes.

I am glad for the winter, for the humbling quiet it can force us into. I just wish I was a wild animal who could hibernate as we are probably supposed to. Instead, rigorous study is my lot - something I'm grateful for too, but sleep would be most natural and I am tempted to follow Annie Dillard's advice when she says “I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.” Surrendering to our instinctual needs, and ceasing to live by the ‘additions’ we have built on to our humanity, that is what I want. I don't do it very well, but oh how much I want to! I am grateful to have been created and to live embodied, to be clay infused with life from the breath of God's own mouth feels good - and I know that He is my one, my great necessity. I want to 'dangle from it limp.'