My favorite season has always been autumn. The crisp air, the smell of the leaves, the golden light and even the rainy fall days. It is also a time of harvest. Gathering what your work in collaboration with the sun and water and soil has produced. This mixed media painting really has an autumn feel. Which is interesting because I made the ecoprint in the spring using spring plants. Although ferns are kind of all season type of plants. But I used a dye that gave that earthy dark purple color and there was iron added as well that produced some of that rusty color amidst the plants that I used to print.
I think I like autumn because it’s a reminder of the transitions in life. While it’s a season of gathering and enjoying the bounty, it is also a season of letting go. I don’t know if it’s just me, but everything right now seems x100. With everything that’s going on right now, that feeling of holding on but things slipping away just seems really strong. Maybe it is just me and being 50 and my kids becoming more independent, and nothing to do with the craziness of the world. Maybe,
And there’s one of my little birds, watching. Being still for a moment. Being grateful for the gifts. Finding calm amidst uncertainty.
I once heard someone say that poets are like our modern day prophets, and that has always stayed with me.
Wild Geese by Wendell Berry
Horseback on Sunday morning,
harvest over, we taste persimmon
and wild grape, sharp sweet
of summer’s end. In time’s maze
over fall fields, we name names
that went west from here, names
that rest on graves. We open
a persimmon seed to find the tree
that stands in promise,
pale, in the seed’s marrow.
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear,
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear. What we need is here.
Sometimes when I read poems I’m like, I really don’t know what that means., like that went over my head…but then at the same time I know deep down in my bones what it means. Then I read it a few more times and I start to understand it more. But I think it’s that mystery that gets me. A mystery and a knowing at the same time.