Vanishing With You

Talk turns lately to bonfires and bones. Goodbyes mix with greetings and it all seems quite fitting given my apple-toned flourish before the winter withering. Yet there is love.

I always fall hard in autumn's liminal beauty – a sort of tip-toeing along the threshold of October's ecstasy and December's torpid drowze. Shoulders shrug for warmth and words become visible as the very soul-breath freezes and hangs in the chilly air. Evergreen remains, and that is always so attractive against the backdrop of gargoyle grey.

So much grey.

Twenty sentences are too many today. The cardinals are chatty just beyond my windowsill and that should be enough. Yet the divine urge to translate desire curls me up in the writing chair.

Take me on a walk -

metaphors relegated to foot-printed grounding and the perfecting presence of heartship

The last few days, I have walked in the rain. The squirrels and birds and deer all did their thing: some hiding, some foraging, some calling to their mates. And their thing is part of the whole, with no beginning or end. No boundaries. And I do my thing, only . . . there is no just me.

The mindful attention to the storied universe suggests that the very words one writes causes an expression and autonomy of one's self, thereby deflecting our awareness of how you and me and she and he and they and ze are really just the manifestations of one, eternal, thing.

Maybe that's why holding hands on an autumn walk, noticing decay and pinecones and creek babble and bird drama is true object of my desire; I vanish that way.

Together.