The sun is becoming infectious. The type of late summer sun that makes me think of fall. Just a little. Just enough to nudge me outside to loungE and soak and sip and exist.
Fall is subtle here down in the deepest south. It doesn’t mean the same thing. Leaves, if they ever fall won’t till December or January. Winter comes, if it ever fully comes, after the holidays are good and done.
But even down here July ends and something else comes to share the stage. A different weight to the air, still warm and humid but with an offering mixed in. “I am coming,” the air says ever so softly. “I am coming with change and sentiment. I carry slowness and warmth. I am already on my way.”
I love every season. All three that we get here. Each shift, slow and crawling as they are, makes me notice all this life in and around me. I take a big delicious pause.
Just like the season I take it slowly. A little here, some more later. It starts with a slow burning desire. A dream creeps in. I start picturing myself in my hammock with a mug. Loving the dragonflies and carpenter bees as they flit around. Finding new joy in the warmth of the sun and air. It is just ever so slightly less warm now. Later, I will dream of hikes and blankets. Time alone, time with my dogs, time with those I love.
Right now a dream of hammock and tea is enough for me. Alone except for the sounds of this city. Alone except for my dogs basking – one in the sun, the other in shade. I think this dream just might be within my reach.
– 9/14/2022 –
And now, a month and a half later, I sit in a city park, a neighborhood park. Tennis balls, children, spanish and scrapping float around me. What a joy to remember the very start of fall. All I hoped for. All that called to me. It calls to me still.
And I have answered. Windows open. Walks and camping. Once biking through the most overgrown paths full of bush and brush you wouldn’t have dared walked. But my how the fall flowers bloomed and the insects sounded. Drought or no, the swamp was alive. Sitting, right now, writing you, under an old and reaching live oak. The branches stretching so long and low you couldn’t walk upright under their sprawling tips. And if I look at this tree that pulled me like a magnet off my path I would see the branches are covered in ferns. Are they ferns? I am unsure but the leaf is that wonderful-delicate-slender thing. Dark green living in the shadows as ferns do. And the little leaves that make up the big leaf, is that how fern leaves work?, are prolific. I think they are marvelous.
Along with the ferns, lichen and spanish moss are settled on this big city tree. It is a bold and bright beacon of what was, what is below concrete and house – Earth.
I am here, writing you, rereading old musings, because my body spoke earlier today and I listened. It told me through feelings of sorrow and disappointment during a massage that was more like a gentle rubbing, it was tired of being half important, kind of cared for, and mostly ignored. By me. It would like something more.
And it is true, truly spending time moving my body feels wasteful. Just not important. Sure, I am deep breathing through my day and pausing to stretch more but I still refuse to spend real time, letting my body be the predominant piece of my existence. I simply refuse. I am terribly grateful to my deep breaths and stretches as they built the connection that allowed me to hear my body’s cries. But as always on a journey worth traveling, one step forward mainly serves to convince you of the long road ahead.
When I walk, as I did from my car to this bench, I focus on where I am going. My brain is fulling turned on. My body is automatic and in service to the directives of my brain. This time though, I wondered what it might be like if walking itself was the goal. Or maybe one of the goals that make up a day full of many things. I was still going to the park but my attention was on walking and feeling and breathing and being. And as I practiced dropping my mind, this bench under the live oak called me. When I opened my notebook, it opened to my last entry in this particular notebook that I had forgotten about. And when I saw the first words I desired to read more, an unusual thing. Usually, I flip anxiously past my old writing, uncomfortable at my own voice. But today, in this noisy park under shade, sun and fern and leaf, I was enriched by reading of that afternoon in September. And once I was done reading I wanted to extend that moment to today by writing to you.
Do no tire of me, dear reader, nor of yourself if your growth isn’t clear and measurable. I know I have written to you before about including my body. But a page or two of us connecting is no magic wand, just small progress on topics to revisit again and again. My friend said to me today “you are so in tune with your body.” Isn’t that funny. I clearly want to be. I feel rewarded for my effort by being able to hear my body earlier. But that communication was that my journey is just starting and to get focused. So no, I don’t feel confident or sure. So much vies for my attention in a day. It takes clarity to remember and then choose time with my body. And knowing me, as I can’t help but do, I get distracted often by shiny new ideas and projects and keys to happiness. All I can hope, all I can reach down and ask Earth for is to keep reminding me. Keep giving me the Dolphin card when I go to pull my medicine card. Keep disappointing me when I try to outsource my body’s care. Though maybe in a month, if I have been focused enough, I could get a real massage. Not to outsource but to enhance.
City park or no, little bugs are everywhere. On me and on this page. I love to pause and watch them.
Don’t ask me how I will handle this next leg of the hike. I don’t know. This isn’t just about exercising, this about listening and flowing and being. A different kind of movement.
Now a woodpecker pecks lightly overhead. I hope he finds something good to eat.
Keep exploring with me reader.
Oh I see him. Black and white and dancing around the branch. His patterning is beautiful. White flecked and striped in his black wings. He makes me understand the beauty in black and white design. Leave it to nature to add life into a palette I often find empty and cold.
My hand is done scrawling. I think I may lay in the sun. Thank you, I am better for this.
– 11/5/2022 –
-El An Gilman-