Welcome

In the middle of Rock Meadow there is an overgrown foundation, home to a motley collection of weeds, including myself. Everyone and everything is welcome there; sentience does not bestow any particular privilege.

I could have been elsewhere this morning, maybe even should have. But the meadow forgives one's deepest reluctances and evasions. And it is broad enough that its distances soon swallow the dirt biker, the jogger, the father and screaming child and the woman with her improbable hula hoop on the crest of the hill.

The meadow overlooks both misanthropy and anthropomorphizing. It likely harbors its own misanthropic tendencies, and who could blame it ?

Fall comes each year as a relief. It is time to pull closed the curtains of rain, of cascading leaves, of lengthening shadows; it is time to swap out green for yellow, red and brown.

Sure, there are still a few slow crickets singing at noon, and some late bloomers out for their brief day in the sun.

But for every new thing, there are hundreds of the dying and dead --

masquerading as dissemination

and fruition --

as they march toward the apotheosis of all hallow's eve.

The tears of the primrose are not piteous enough to stop the juggernaut. Nothing is.

And that is the blessing and the wounding, which are, after all, the same thing. Miraculous love's wounding goes the song, and it is true.

If love, both divine and human, is construed as a  letting be, it is also a letting go. The camera might freeze an instant of light, but only to remind that more instants will ensue.

And more winters, springs, summers and falls as have ensued in one's personal life as well as in all the times before and times after.

Which exacts something -- a call to attention, appreciation, relinquishment --

measured variations on the deep bass ground, the ceaseless drone of being here at all. 

The myriad things: the meadow is their laboratory.

What do we do with these nightshades ?

this toadflax

or the silver sleepless eye of the bittersweet ?

We look, greet, say farewell; they look back, and in their own way greet and say farewell.

What is the opposite of anthopormorphizing ?  I meadowfy myself --

rest facedown in tansy sweetness before the frost bears me away.

I begin to feel the spacious relinquishment of Robert Frost's great poem, "After Apple-Picking",

as if it were rising from my very cells.

But there's also the miles to go before I sleep warring with drowsiness --

and the sense of urgency -- not so much a task to complete, but of something that is drawing near -- of an almost but not quite --

of the timeless entangled --

with the temporal --  as it always is --

something in and out of focus, crystallizing then dissolving again --

Welcome, says the matless foundation of my meadow home.

Welcome mat, waiting room, antechamber to apocalypse; and pray that it will not be in winter --

But winter always comes, and the desolating thing will have its due.