The Journey Continues...

[Chris Anderson/Onefeather]

A beautiful sunrise, new moon in Virgo and the beginnings of the season of harvest. My neighbor's sugar maple is just beginning to show spots of scarlet & gold, a signal that soon the winds will shift from west and south to north by northwest and cool dry Canadian air will flow into the region.

Down the road at my friends orchard the apples are coming fully ripe on bough and pumpkins grow round and plump in the field. Farmers locally have baled the last vestiges of sweet alfalfa that cows and horses and other animals they tend will savor when snow has blanketed the ground, along with corn neatly compacted, curing in silos all around the county. Soy beans and summer oats have also been collected... and for us gardeners, well, the tomatoes are ripe, the squash full and ready to be tucked away in the cellar for Thanksgiving and Christmas festivities. Onions, potatoes, beets and turnips are properly preserved also... root vegetables for the soups and stews that warm the soul in chill February.

This passage of time, this life... uncomplicated and elemental, has a sweetness about it that's not easily communicated. This life becomes timeless with the years fading like small waves left in the wake of my journey. The shining star on the horizon, sparkling against a purple and indigo evening sky... gives me bearing, corrects my course.

My voice, my remembrances of hot, hot summers, unusually cold winters and the ebb and flow of the changing seasons, causes me to consider the years of my parents and their parents... and the writ of sage and prophet peppered across the pages of history... and I rest secure in the inviolate rhythm of life. Those who bang the drum of doom and trumpet alarm either have not lived with Nature long enough to understand her, or are given to mischievousness and shadows of malice toward their fellows here in the material world.

If Armageddon is upon us it most likely will arrive in a flash, a comet or asteroid or some other mindless fall into oblivion... but I believe life has purpose; that life is the true and constant expression of some eternal Beingness that's the sum and total of all life, down to the lowest worm as well as the highest lark on wing. That life animates this frail body for a few days and spins onward into eternity... and I am that life: I am that I AM.

And so, Dear Hart, give up those fears. Fret not and worry about nothing... Life will take care of Itself and It's own... time now to put more tomatoes in jars for cooking and sharing when winter storms across the land.

Much love to all from my September cottage by the Lake of Powers, Wisconsin 2010.