The things we all deserve

Autumn is here. It hasn’t really cooled down, but the light is warmer and dimmer and yellow leaves are falling to the black asphalt. I always think I’m going to hate the new season but the change never fails to seduce me.

Today is a day where I’m dwelling somewhere between nostalgia and sadness. I’m in solid melancholy territory, really.

Face is hurting like it has for the last month. But the writing is coming easily today. Super bonus. Life got messier yesterday on several fronts, and I want it to be easier than it is.

But it’s not. And the thing is, it doesn’t have to be easier.

I talked to a close friend today and remembered how a year ago she and her children were in mortal danger. Someone was hurting her physically and tormenting her financially and emotionally. That memory reminds me that life for me isn’t actually all that tough. Yes, I’m in physical distress, but I have the power to change that. Yes, the job of my dreams requires draconian budgeting, but I. Love. It. And I’m on the right path and there’s a sense of rightness that comes along with that that beats the best white cake with white icing that’s out there.

Back to the joy of the changing of the seasons. I came into this life with a complex set of equipment — thanks mommy and thanks poppy — but that equipment carries with it a capacity for adventure, experience, kindess and joy. For hewing closely to life path and meaning. I’m a lucky woman. One of the luckier ones, maybe.

And so here it is. I look up above the horizon at the place where for me I can most easily sense the grand Divine and I think, 'I have so much to be grateful for and I deserve none of it.' Tears come to my eyes and they caress their way through my distressed sinuses.

It’s not so much why bad things happen to good people. It’s that good things happen to all of us. I’m blessed to a far greater degree than I deserve and today that’s giving me a great deal of comfort.

My integrated spiritual system: Gratitude and Acceptance

"Hello, goodbye." - Heidi Wilson

This morning I got up before dawn to walk and to watch the darkest night of the year fade into its shortest day. There's a wash behind my house. It runs perhaps half the time. Fifty yards up from the house is a grotto I visited frequently through the summer and fall. There's a little spring, coyote willows choking around it, the smell of water in the desert. One day, I sat down and spent time with a garter snake who made no effort to flee.

This morning, I noticed that the willows were gone. Someone and their heavy equipment had eradicated all the vegetation around my hidden spring. Its secrets lay exposed, the smell of its water dispersed over the open ground.

I felt sad and rued the stupidity of the fool who removed the native stabilizing vegetation from a flooding wash. And then I remembered my integrated, complete and user-friendly spiritual system of gratitude and acceptance.

I feel grateful for all those moments of escape and grateful for the time I helped the moth with the moisture-pinned wings escape from the side of a clear puddle. I placed him on a branch in the sun and watched him flutter away a few minutes later. He seemed to resent me with that casual entitledness that's charming in children and animals. We trust, it says.

I feel grateful, deeply so, that I spent that time in that eradicated space. Precious shade gone from the desert. And I accept it. Hello, goodbye. Change happens. Health fails, bodies age, and even the halest among us dies. Life is for living, I heard recently, and no matter the misfortune, most of us live it with gusto. We lack eyes, some of us, love, others. But we keep on living. Our bodies fold into wrinkles and our beauty falls away, and yet the joy of watching children and dogs at play remains. The first bite of a good meal, the subtle, unassailable joy of solitude. It remains.

Until it doesn't.

And until we don't.