Coming in for a Kiss

In all my Michigan Octobers, I do not remember one as sublime and tender as this. Affectionate air and the bursts of calico descend slowly enough to catch sunlight in their spiral. It is personal yet expansive – intimate like a lover.

For a few hours, I rested my back against the pine and buried my bare feet under the leaves, making contact with the dirt. The sun lifted my face and tilted my head back as if it were coming in for a kiss. I asked Earth Mother how I could reciprocate, as if I even could. I was urged to collect a bouquet of the beauty around me as an offering: red and gold maples leaves, the last few springs of lavender, a dying purple kale flower, the rusted sedum bloom, two of the last marigolds from the garden border, and two amber fern fronds. I'll dry them a little before burning and in the meantime, they fill the back room with the sweet and spicy breath of October.

In many ways, I feel like I have tended my marriage and family the way I have tended land I borrow. It has been a learning curve instead of an innate set of unbendable convictions guiding my role and thoughts. Yet I have been confused about who I am in marriage. I am not Earth Mother, and I am not the land. Am I the gardener? If that is so, am I always the gardener? Am I a plant, needing the earth AND the sun to exist? However it is that this analogy works out, my only prayer now is that I truly see, with love and clarity, the fullness of Love offered and my role in the concurrence.

The sun barely clears the treeline now and its light slants shadows long and dark. Whatever answer I am looking for is right in front of me and it always has been. October helps now, not as a precursor to the long death of the winter, but as a celebration of the marriage of all the senses. And in this, I am letting go.