How fitting that the subject of this post is about loss. I initially spent several hours working on this post, trying to coax the words from my muddled head, and then something went wrong with my internet and I lost it all. Ahh, such is life.
For a girl who claims a passion for writing, I sure have had a difficult time of it lately. My heart is so full of things to say, yet my mind will not relinquish the words. October is my favorite month, and fall is my favorite season. I must admit that any other time of the year I hate orange; it is an obnoxious color that seems to compete with all the other colors for a claim to vibrancy, however, in this season, it brings to mind pumpkins, lying ripe in the fields and the blanket of leaves that covers the still frozen ground. The sky is a chilly blue, covered in patches of deep gray, and even the woods radiate a sort of mysticism. Indeed it seems as though some form of magic dwells deep within them, amongst the dead, decaying branches of alder wood, inside the caves and rocky crevices, beckoning to me beneath the light of a full moon. Tales of twisted fairies, ghost stories and macabre poetry flood my mind, attempting to escape through the frantic tip of my racing pen. Why am I drawn to a season so defined by things lost?
Right now I am preparing for some life changes. I am moving the first of November, literally just down the street, and on Tuesday I have an interview for a job that I have been dreaming about for the past month. As necessary as change is, it terrifies me. When I was a child, I understood the need for change, the growth it brought about and the uncertainty of it all. I also knew there was not a thing that could be done to halt change; it is as much a part of life as the air we breathe. I can recall crying when my mom made simple changes around the house: repainting my room, putting new wood flooring in the kitchen, changing the backyard, moving my swing set, etc… Growing up we had 99 eucalyptus trees surrounding our house. I know that because I used to count them, to ensure my mother didn’t follow through with her threats of cutting any of them down. I loved those trees passionately. On a windy day, I would run outside and spin and twirl beneath them, laughing as the leaves danced around me. I used to pretend I was in a great forest or that I was a girl captured by an Indian tribe, forced to live in their secluded village. I even named some of the trees, and made plans to climb each and every one of them (I was a little too afraid of heights at the time). Then one day my mother’s threats turned to reality. One by one my beautiful trees, my friends, were felled and cut into pieces to be burned. I cried and argued and yelled, I even tried to sabotage their attempts, stealing keys to the tractors and flinging them into the fish pond, but there always seemed to be spares. That fall I became acquainted with searing loss. It was one way to crush the spirit of a little girl. Looking back now, I wonder if that is why I am so drawn to trees, to forests, to places where I can feel remote, where I can dream and not worry that all of it is about to be taken away.
These days change comes in different forms, a new place to live, a new relationship, a new country to explore, the loss of friends and family… But then again, the loss of friends has never been a new experience, I lost more friendships, experienced more betrayals by children when I was a child, than I have in all of my adult life. But something has come from that loss, growth. In some ways, I matured at a young age, I understood loss and knew that it was something that would follow me all my life. And the things I have learned… It’s funny, people usually refer to fall and winter as those in between seasons, the ones that bring about death. The leaves die, the trees are stripped, the skies darken, the nights grow long and some creatures do indeed die from starvation or cold. “Just make it through winter, the spring is coming.” “Spring, the perfect month of new life, of renaissance.” I would argue that without death, that without loss, there would be no understanding of life, there would be no re-birth. Do not look at winter simply as a lesson that can be learned, as the staging point on the way to Spring, see it as growth, see it as a precious, sacred part of life, for as much light as there is in a human soul, there is much darkness as well.
MUSINGS OF A WANDERER 