A Stillness at Summer’s End

I don’t know how August went for you, but I had a very rough go of it. It’s easy to complain about the situations that moved me from a place of ease and gratitude to one of heightened stress and grief, but I find myself continually re-framing them as opportunities for practice. Over the last month there were a lot of opportunities to practice breathing and centering; patience; creating accessible language and communications;  unraveling the tangled stories that still live in me about what it means to be a daughter, a sister, a wife, a caretaker, and my own judgements around expectations (from myself and from others). I was reminded once more of how honestly I come by my tenacity, my stubbornness, my impetus to care for and advocate for others. I practiced patience, teaching, saying “no,” and met once more the concept of the three gates of speech and how to hold my tongue (which took a lot at moments). It was a month of reminders that we’re never finished learning and integrating and healing, no matter how far along that path we believe we are.

I was reminded above all how much grief is directly proportional to love.

Autumn heralds the sunset time of the year, not only seasonally but in accordance to many wheel conceptualizations of time in earth-based ceremonial practices. The Medicine Wheel holds autumn in the South and the sunset time of day/life. The Wheel of the Year in neo-pagan reckoning places the last harvest festivals of Mabon and Samhain directly across from the life-affirming rites of Imbolc and Beltane. In the autumn, the last fruits are gathered in, the seeds from which will become the fruits of the following year. Life and death and rebirth. Repeat.

We are the seeds our parents have sown. We have their genetic traits, and we may also have some of their behavioral traits. Some we may deny, and some we may cherish. For example, I, like my mother, have a tendency to care for everyone else before I care for myself. I have learned how to also care for myself, but it has taken a lot of practice. I am trying to teach my mother that it is also time for her to learn this, to let go of the stories that lead her to believe that doing so is selfish and wrong. She has cared so much for others her entire life, given so much of herself away. I am advocating that she know how it feels to be cared for, cherished, without feeling guilty or ashamed about it at this point in her life. It’s heartbreaking to hear her resistance to this, that somehow she feels unworthy even after all she has endured in life. But I, like my mother, have a stubborn streak as mighty as the Rockies, and I’m not giving up on this.

Because I love her just as much as she loves me.

September and the coming of autumn will be an opportunity for practicing the process of integrating grief, and love, and release. In the larger world beyond the hardships of my own interpersonal experience, there is so much to grieve—in human systems of power over dynamics like colonialism and extractive capitalism and the suffering they bring to the humans and the other-than-humans with whom we co-habitate on the very living earth. It can be challenging to meet the expectation of functioning regularly when atrocities like genocide and species extinctions are happening every day. We may feel powerless in the face of these. This is a valid feeling. And we can only begin where we stand in the world, with ourselves and with our immediate neighbors. We can take the opportunities to practice breathing, centering, patience, grieving, saying “no” and teaching others about loving kindness and our interconnectedness.

Let us be the seeds sown as the wheel turns and we move through the darkness to the dawn.