Steam rises from my coffee, a thin thread lifting into the air, then disappearing.
The sun climbs through the pines on the ridge. Light drifts across the leaf-strewn lawn, moves through the bare undergrowth, and enters my kitchen. It settles on the table where I sit, warming my face and these still hands.
In this valley, sunrise travels far along the horizon as the seasons turn. In summer, it breaks through the oak leaves at six, flooding the rooms with gold. Now it arrives near eight, lower and softer, threading between pine trunks to find me.
Five hours of daylight have slipped away since midsummer. Greens have faded to brown and gray. Even the light feels changed—thinner, more tender, as if carrying the season’s breath within it.
The deer feel the shift. Their stomachs turn with the seasons. As spring’s soft shoots became summer’s tougher leaves, they adjusted to digest more fiber. As the last leaves fell, they changed again to eat twigs and bark—food shaped for the cold months ahead. Now, a sweet apple welcomed when the canopy was full is now a poison their winter bodies cannot bear.
I watch a small doe strip a dry wineberry cane outside the window. She moves slowly, deliberately, gathering what she can. When the branches are bare and snow settles over the valley, some will starve. Others will live on the quiet fire of stored fat until spring returns.
What can be endured is endured.
When it cannot, we fall.
There is nothing to fear.
The leaf drifts down.
The starved deer settles into snow.
A man’s breath quiets, then slips into stillness.
All of it held in the vastness from which it rose,
a nearness we can never lose.
Changing shape, taking on light,
returning in forms not always clear at first,
yet through which we endlessly rise—an intimacy so complete
that we rarely notice it,
even as it shines through everything.