Autumn Mosaic - Delores Stewart

Before we come with rakes and crackling
energy to clean it up,
the backyard is precisely
as the dog prefers it - left alone,
a natural selection
of leaf, stick, bone, pod, seed, and stone.

But we are cosmic instruments
of music and disturbance, only
animals by half,
and will not let the season bleed
its shifting earth designs
of stone, bone, leaf, stick, pod and seed.

Some earthscapes rearranged
are gardens, or hillsides
shorn to make a path for wired poles
or graveyards stiff with grief
or clearcut forests.  Let me take care
of seed, stone, pod, bone, stick, and leaf.

Let me recall the universe
is breathing in my breath, it plays
its tune in me, it dreams my being -
an unnamed, unrecorded god
becoming conscious as I am
of leaf, seed, stick, stone, bone, and pod.

I am a painting made of sand and pollen.
Structure and spirit
are my codes.  Nothing of life
is random or a trick
I draw myself a part of all
with pod, leaf, bone, seed, stone, and stick.

The circle of the seasons turns
and never comes back quite the same.
Fertile impulses in time
will overgrow the patterns I have sown,
return to animal wilderness
of stick, pod, stone, leaf, seed and bone.

Let me be glad
new seasons bud from stick and leaf,
new forces split a pod and spill the seed,
new rhythms rise from stone and bone.

Delores Stewart
From: Doors to the Universe

Original title: September Mosaic

with thanks to Beyond the Fields We Know

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For the Equinox

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Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

 

Melancholy - Fred LaMotte

 Even on the most radiant days, there is a sorrow at the heart
of life.  When we deny it, the day becomes a desperate quest
for happiness, and the night is long.  But when we absorb the
trough into our rhythm, like the shadow of the breath, that
benign negation infuses all things with spaciousness, tinges
creation with golden poignancy, like Autumn itself.
What is heavy is not sadness, but the denial of sadness.

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance
original title - "Autumn"

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For all those tasting the sadness of these
unimaginable strange times that we are living through -
not only the losses from COVID, but
from the devastating fires on the West Coast, and the
hurricanes on the Gulf Coast affecting so many lives,
as well as the racial unrest, and the political upheaval
across this country.
May we all find the deep Quiet within..

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
Sunset Heart Leaves