When That's All There Is

I look out the window at the fire pit, with its empty red box of pampers lying under the most recent addition of twigs, and some kind of palate beneath, the limb that fell in the last storm – not yet broken and placed there – but nearby, and I know there’s more leafs covering the ground and that they’re brown, and that fall really is here and in two months or two weeks it’ll be winter. But today it’s sunny, and the leafs are still green and some yellow and dazzling, and definitely hanging on. There’s still a canopy.

It’s not like this grief stuff didn’t really happen, or like I didn’t have this feeling today…once again…as if it’s a continual kind of thing that I don’t often notice, and that I may be grieving the “old life” as a way of moving into the new.

There’s a lot of change going on. How could there not be when everything is in flux and you’ve moved into a place with your whole family, and at times it seems like with the whole world, where you’re aware of it. That’s the thing. You can go through so much of life acting as if things don’t change when they are always changing. Like your life day-to-day will stay the same when it never does.

Then you hear yourself say things.

“How is everything?”

“Uncertain.”

Okay.

Sometimes I’m glad for the awareness. Sometimes I wish like hell it would go away…or that something really stabilizing would appear out of the mists. It seems natural enough to me.

I walked out here in the dark this morning to turn on the heater and the light. There was a bright star hanging over the freeway fence. I went back in, made my coffee, my peanut butter and honey sandwich, fed the cats. When I came back out, the star was nowhere to be seen. But on my second walk, there was a light in the cabin window and I was filled with joy and hope and all things peaceful.

I guess what I’m saying is that being aware that change is here and coming and all of that doesn’t have to be like it was last week in the storm and wind and cold.

You need a break. You don’t need it in your face. And sometimes, when you notice a star, or a light in the window, or when the sun is shining…that’s all there is.