White Wildflowers – Photo: L. Weikel
Change of Seasons
Is it the change of seasons that’s making me so tired every night? The past several evenings I’ve found myself struggling to keep my eyes open and my thoughts coherent. It’s been a bit frustrating because I’ve been feeling enthusiastic and eager to throw myself into some new adventures and projects – during the day – but as soon as Karl goes to bed, it’s as if I’m covered in a haze of pixie dust that immediately puts me to sleep.
It’s weird. And I have to say: it throws me off.
Another thing I notice particularly since the equinox on September 22nd: the evening light has not been romantically taking its time, gradually fading. No. It actually feels more like an old-fashioned bank clerk abruptly pulling the shade on their service window. It’s as if the darkness descends suddenly and all at once.
It’s unsettling.
Recent Musings
If you’ve been reading my posts lately, you know I’ve been pondering how I would react to knowing my time here on Earth was going to end in the easily foreseeable future. A variety of occurrences in my orbit of friends and family have catalyzed such musings.
One person, someone I can truthfully only call an acquaintance, is Ellen Fein. I met Ellen tangentially through an online group comprised of people who’ve attended a Taos Writing Retreat with Jen Louden. It’s a testament to Jen as a retreat facilitator, the vulnerability of writing itself, or perhaps even the magic of Taos Mountain how many of us have remained in touch and actually feel we know each other quite well after only spending a short week together.
And some of us never actually met in person because we attended the Taos Retreat in different years. But that didn’t matter. Obviously. There was something about Ellen and her comments and musings, her voice, her attitude toward life that resonated with me so deeply that I’m honestly hard put to say whether we ever met in person. I feel like we must have. And yet…
Anyway, Ellen revealed to us (her writing community), a few months ago at the most, that after a period of remission for some years, she was experiencing a recurrence of cancer and kidney disease that did not bode well. As a result of her life’s work, she decided to share with us the process of her conscious and gradual letting go.
Photo: L. Weikel
Grace
Oddly (or perhaps not so oddly), she was very much on my mind as I was grieving Spartacus’s sudden demise. Wondering how she was, and feeling that perhaps she was on the brink of crossing over as well, I looked for her on FB to no avail. I tried to find her blog posts without success. And then just the other day (all my days seem to have run together lately), I saw the publication of Ellen’s final post – with a postscript by her daughter. I saw that she’d passed away the day after Spartacus – just after that powerful full moon and a day before the change of seasons, the equinox.
There’s honestly nothing I can say here that adds anything to the conversation. I would instead ask you to read Ellen’s last three posts. Her grace, humor, and beautiful soul shine through and speak for themselves.
You can find them here. May she be an inspiration to all of us.
(T-51)