Autumn Journal: What Remains is Radiant
One year ago today, I began this journal.
Today I finish, while I have the strength to do it well.
The year’s circle is complete.
My final reflection is about the freedom of release.
About how letting go becomes the blessing.
About how, in the unclenching, we discover what remains.
And what remains is radiant.
Autumn Journal: Kindness
Five hours of daylight have slipped away since midsummer.
Deer eat bark. The sun arrives later. Steam lifts from my coffee, then disappears.
This reflection is about winter’s quiet shift—
how we adapt, how we endure, how everything falls and rises again.
There is nothing to fear.
The leaf drifts down. The breath fades.
And still, the light shines through everything.
Autumn Journal: Yellowjacket
Today felt like summer.
The maple leaves burned red, and hornets circled the last tomatoes.
This reflection is about the dying members of a broken home —
their hunger, their panic, their separateness.
And how, if we look closely, we might see something familiar in their flight.
Chasing sweetness. Fearing frost.
Autumn Journal: Golden Hour
Sunrise sets the valley ablaze—trees become torches, a doe turns to gold, and birds fill the air with coins of sound.
And then… rain. Silence. Letting go.
This reflection is about how beauty arrives without warning, and departs without apology.
And how, in its passing, it burns with the brilliance of the eternal.
Autumn Journal: Black Walnut
They fall like green cannonballs—Black Walnuts pounding the forest floor, their hard gifts wrapped in bitterness and dye.
This reflection is about what grows in consequence—
how every squirrel, fern, fox, and fallen nut tells a deeper story of unity, shaped by starlight, soil, and time.
Wait. Let the husk rot. Crack the shell.
Light waits within.
Autumn Journal: Fullness
The first true autumn morning arrived,
carried on cool air and chickadee song.
This reflection is about the season of fullness—
when summer’s fire fades, fruit falls, and the world prepares to empty itself.
But not yet.
Not yet.
Autumn Journal: All is Well
Day by day, the self erodes—yet what remains is luminous.
Hands falter, dignity fades, memories scatter like leaves. But beneath this gradual dissolution is a vast stillness, beyond stories and names, beyond loss and forgetting.
This reflection is about the quiet radiance that emerges as the familiar self washes away—
revealing something timeless and unbreakable.
All is well.