Seasons Change

I love the Bangles. Rewind to me at 14, and you’ll find me and three of my best friends at Magic Mountain in Southern California, in one of those Make Your Own Music Video studios, belting out Eternal Flame in an exuberant cacophany of swelling adolescent emotion. Don’t laugh at our big hair.

Anyway. I’ve noticed that we – or maybe I should say I – tend to think of Fall and Spring as seasons that lead to other seasons. That is, autumn is getting ready for – leading up to – Winter. Spring is the opening act for Summer. But why?

My theory is that Fall and Spring are more overtly active seasons – they seems restless, windy, full of change. Trees change daily, from nothing to bright somethings, or later, from ubiquitous greens to crazed shades of tie-dye. And in Winter and Summer, changes are much slower, if evident at all. In Winter, it’s cold and dead. In Summer, everything’s limply hot and slow.

Of course, the world never stops changing.

I am trying to change the story in my head about the seasons. I am trying to think of Fall as a permanent condition. Loss, loss, loss. It’s constant. It doesn’t lead to anything else, any resolve, any final kingdom. Or taking the whole cycle into consideration, it always leads back to itself.

How you see it depends on how you tell the story, I guess. Which season do you see as the first one? Which one is the last?

Cheating at Azalea Park

We went to a different park today, and I missed having my camera with me. Brown sunflowers sullenly hanging their heads in a frozen posture of depletion; a cracked white bucket sprouting the wreckage of a garden hose.

S & M tree

It’s autumn, glorious and full of loss; always feels like the first time; always feels another layer is being pulled off, and I’m even more tender than I was the year before. The winter will come, bluntly.

Thinking about grief and sadness, I realized that there are people I have lost that I don’t mourn any longer. But if someone asked me, “How did you manage to get over your grief?” I wouldn’t have a self-help mantra or a five-step easy soul diet to share; the only agent at work on the various broken places in my heart has been good old Time.

Seriously: Time heals all wounds is one of those true cliches that describes – well, what happens.

You don’t have to DO anything about your grief; you don’t have to fix it, change it, nix it. Let your grief be what it is, and eventually, it will seep. Time will suck it out, like poison from a snakebite. Sure, you can resist this very natural process – feed off the poison, so to speak. But you don’t have to. You don’t have to do anything.

I was reminded, as we picked our way through the shambly community gardens, that I appreciate Taoism because this kind of Let it Be attitude negates the ego’s pride in human efforts without any snarky finger-wagging.

The trees will let their leaves go.

This loss is not a trauma.

Pain is not an aberration.

And so, it is easier now to think of my father, ten years’ dead this year. I will always, always miss him. Something will always feel Not Quite Right because of his absence. I still have moments of thinking that I’ve forgotten to call someone, and I wrack my brain trying to think who I’ve forgotten, only to realize it’s him.

But it has been ten years. The pain has lessened. It went of its own volition. In some ways, I did want to cling to it, because I didn’t want to let go of him, and the sadness of his loss was almost comforting, it was a way to think about him, to make him keep existing.

But he does not exist. Even his effects, his papers, notebooks, crosses, ink pens, books, the box of ashes – the physical evidence – they are scattered, and drying up. There is no cohesion. Because there is no him.

Hiking a year ago

There’s more open sky at this park; a creek; a dog park. We take it all in.

This current sadness, I wish I could take a picture of it.

But really, there’s nothing I can do about it.