The season of sorrow cradled within an odd quiet, even sacred, beauty is here. It is the subtle blossoming of brittle white flowers snaking up from the depths of my heart that tells me it's that time again. Like clockwork, the first shoots of these little ice buds appear in early September. Sometimes I don't realize it has taken hold because it can be very subtle at first. And I think, or used to think, maybe it won't come this year, maybe it won't come at all ever again now that I am older, wiser, and god knows I've done enough therapy that surely, I think, some year it will just not come. Well, I am older. In fact, I am indeed actually old and I know this, if I know nothing else, I may as well light the candles and settle in with my prayer beads, for the season of grieving and dying is here. Right here, in this body, in this room. I know by the new layering of numbness that simply, naturally happens, like a bear's growth of a winter coat, and by the constriction in my heart, holding in, or holding back, the skies, the oceans pressing upon me from within and without. And then there is the telltale cool flatness of emotional terrain like a white, jagged coral reef floating upon a low, rumbling tide of anger grounding me to this earth, dropping lower, acknowledging what is here, preparing for what is to come.
Well, I remind myself, it's only until February.
