fall is for falling

transmissions from a transition.

mesocosom.

I’m riding the crest of the year, and I can feel dying in everything. And I can also feel the beginnings that follow all those endings rising up from the core of the earth like an amaryllis or something that looks like nothing before it becomes everything. It’s the time when it’s nearly impossible to find the borderline between what’s most alive and what is nearly gone forever. How the leaves that have already fallen are being pressed into the ground by our feet, and will eventually become dirt. How the harvest marks the most spiralic place on the wheel of the year. How the staircase goes both ways.

It’s felt a lot like that lately. Rising and falling. Soaring and sinking. The middle. The chaos and the ground. The animal and the divine. Nature and society.

Luna tells me that she believes the songs we played for them when they were babies shaped who they are today, and it felt true against the dark and the light on our way home from school. It feels true against the temporality of the cloud formations passing above us, and the pumpkins on the doorsteps, and the dropping light of late October.

It’s officially Scorpio season, and I’ve already felt like crying at least one hundred times. I cried as I read the final words of a client’s manuscript. I cried in the forest, in my car, listening to a podcast, a song, in a conversation, and other places, too, but I can’t remember them all or keep track. I’m forgetting things and tired in a way where my bones are begging for respite.

I’ve been taking ten-minute naps here and there, and I’m getting good at it. Something happens around 2 pm every day, and I can barely keep my eyes open. Something happens at 5 am in the morning, and my eyes open for good.

This week, I’ll have five stitches from the bottom of my foot removed. Trying to make this specific type of appointment required more calls than I had planned, and eventually, when I was all set, another nurse called to double-check whether I wanted to book for a more convenient time, like next week. I probably cried after we hung up; she was so kind, she was so thoughtful.

I have found it hard to accept people’s offers of care and concern. As if there’s a quota for how much kindness and care one person can receive. I suppose after the last few years, I must feel like I’ve been the recipient of enough to last me the rest of my life. But if I’m being honest, the last few weeks have been exceptionally rugged, and if kindnesses were the rain, my skin has taken them in as far as they can go, like the desert. But they still make me cry. It’s something about the beauty, the shared pain, and all we can see and all we cannot. It’s something about the threads that weave us together across our respective lives, reminding us that we aren’t alone —just often carrying heavy things all by ourselves.

While I was cooking dinner, a kitchen plumbing problem arose, so we could once again be reminded of our fragility and also our resilience. We filled bucket after bucket of water from under the sink while I reached across the stove to keep dinner going, Fonz laying on the floor, our lives one big fat joke with some absurd punchline that goes something like, “How many middle-aged broken hearts does it take to fix a pipe,” and then I’m not sure how it ends but I think we get eaten by zombies or AI and we wake up from the dream before we can find out.

Rafi turns 12 on Saturday, and so, here I am time-traveling again. I remember being pregnant with her, the dreams I had where I met her first. I remember her birth, every single one of those 48 hours. I remember changing her diapers, staying up all night, and wandering through the hardest parts of breastfeeding. I remember her first words, “Okay, Okay, Okay.” I remember her then, and I see her now. How we pass each other on the path between perimenopause and puberty, and then we find each other in the hallway at bedtime. I find ways to know her life, and she shares what she can put to words, and I do my best to leave the door open for the rest to flow between us. Like rivers we cross over lands like veins, intersecting and also winding our own way. And still, even though she’s practically my height, there’s still a large part of me that wants to inhale her back into my body. I think it’s my heart.

So if this were all a prayer or a blessing sent out on the wind, I’d wrap it up in a language all its own. I’d say, bless this chaos that creates disorder, so that I may recognize what flies around the center, wanting desperately to be ordered and brought in, because it is this very flight pattern that shows me what matters most. I’d say, let there be chaos so that I can remember over and over again what I love and how to bow to it all without reservation and do it like I might not get the chance to again. Bless the homage to surrender I’ve mapped my life around. The mystery, magic, the misery, and all this love that makes grief the most beautiful aesthetic. This chaos I’m not trying to deny but rather learn to laugh with, cry with, sleep beside, write into, embrace, soothe, and love. And then bless my front door, where I welcome it all back home, remembering that home can also be the crest of a wave.

I opened up registration for a whole bunch of online Pop-Up Four Chambers Writing classes this past Tuesday during the AWS shutdown and felt the strange sensation of throwing my arms up in the dark, or screaming into a pillow. The class store links are now live, and the doors are wide open. Please join me. Let’s write together.