Within a month the scene played out beyond my window has changed it’s base hues from yellow and red to brown and gray. Winter is a less than a month away, and today the wind is numb, a fair preview for the molecule stopping, thought stalling breath that is being prepared higher up the mountains. Still, it’s beautiful. The fractal, skeletal trees intersect and crosshatch the sky with their sleeping tendrils, and the pine makes music as it dances in the cold. The giddy playfulness is gone, replaced with an introspective seriousness… a landscape-wide contemplation of survival, a reverent bow to the spinning wheel of death and rebirth.

In the first frosts and the gutter-clinging icicles waiting-to-happen, the world will be resolved to purity and readiness once again. Bygone pageantry, now crumbled and withered, awaits shattering and dispersion as the wheel passes over. I, too, open my chest and bare my soul and skin to the chill, asking it to be cleansed by the coming and going of ice. Not everything has been well, you see, and I’m casting into the season what is crumpled within, to be blown about ‘til it’s dust, so I can start again. As each curled and lifeless leaf billows by on the other side of this drafty glass, I give thanks for the green it was and the green to come, as well as the resetting of the tableaux taking place right now, as tiny bones dissolve back to potential.

This cycle, this sometimes violent, sometimes graceful Kali-Shiva dance of pummel and perception underlies atoms, our genes, and our identity. The seasons of storms, of creation and destruction, are perpetual, really; but the symbolic mind looks at a cowering Thursday’s world and sees that within, identifies with it, reckons itself from it. As I think of what to say next, a neuron winks out of existence, making for a slight stumble, while elsewhere in my body an electron jumps orbit, making a quantum leap, and a particle changes charge from negative to positive. As degrees drop outside, so long as there is life, fires rage within and fuel the mechanisms of consciousness, which fuels me to declare to the wind “take away, now, what is useless and barren.” In this vast complexion of extremes, to be able to think and to live, to be able to accept and let go, to be baptized in tears or recoiled with laughter, I must be thankful.

Today is a feast day for the thankful. Under the glowering late autumn mush of a sky, the heat will be turned up and families will gather, knowingly or unknowingly, to celebrate and affirm relative abundance. This harvest ritual, this proud rite of devouring what was made plentiful by a sun now receding, will be leftovers tomorrow, it’s novelty fades with entropy. My meal today will be simple, for the grace I’m uplifting in gratitude is the gusting and encroaching wail that will resolve what brokenness I mourn by scattering it back to Earth. Call it a prayer. Call it a wish. Call it madness. I give thanks by surrendering to the darkening days, knowing that more and more light is the promise that awaits.