Autumn Journal: Witness
Steam curls from my coffee.
Sunlight threads through pine.
Five hours lost since midsummer, and still—this light, this table, this breath.
This reflection is about what remains.
Not symbol. Not story. Just this moment, luminous and complete.
Autumn Journal: Treefrog
A treefrog rests on the patio railing. I rest beside it.
Both of us drawn to the last warmth of an unseasonably golden autumn day.
This reflection is about what happens when you pause long enough to share light with another fragile life—
and how even illness, like winter, might just be another kind of transformation.
All gifts are borrowed.
That’s what makes them shine.
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.
Summer Journal: After the Storm
The heat broke with a roar.
The storm came like a cleansing rage—wind tearing leaves, lightning painting the night, water reshaping the earth.
This reflection is about that fierce reset…
and the quiet morning after, where a great blue heron stands atop my daughter’s car,
and we meet as two survivors.
Renewal doesn’t always whisper.
Sometimes, it howls.
Summer Journal: Tree Trunks
The season’s first tropical storm arrives like a wanderer from the Gulf.
Rain falls for five days. The valley overflows.
This reflection is about flood and movement, wind and breakage—
and the deeper stillness that holds beneath it all.
Summer Journal: Slack Tide
Summer pools in the valley’s cup.
Green towers. Cicadas rise. Life pulses with urgency beneath a canopy of light.
But even here—
in this heat-heavy fullness,
the turning has begun.
This reflection is about summer’s slack tide—
a moment poised between ripeness and release.
Summer Journal: River and Cup
Above the valley, the wind howls and the trees toss like restless giants.
But down here, all is still.
This reflection is about air that rushes, air that rests—
and butterflies that drift like falling petals, rediscovering flight with every breath.
Summer Journal: Psycopomp
This morning, I found six Turkey Vultures in the dead tree by the side yard—
wings outstretched like crucifixes, rising with the sun.
This reflection is about what we miss when we turn from what we fear.
Turkey Vultures are not death’s messengers. They are its midwives.
Psychopomps. Cleaners. Carriers of the sacred in decay.
Through them, the forest is not defiled. It is reborn.
Summer Journal: What the Rain Knows
This reflection begins with hidden fawns and the memory of a dying mother who refused to stop nursing her living child.
It ends with rain—each drop a story of falling, dissolving, and returning to something greater.
Some things are too heavy for the sky to hold.
But nothing is ever lost. Only transformed.