Today I put up the four-foot office Christmas tree, wrapped strands of red and white LED lights around its branches, hung the shiny, red, child-proof ornament balls with paperclips, placed the vintage gold star on top.
I cherish the Christmas season with all of its crisp hope and peppermint. Still. I need to pause a moment before December hits this week, to revel in all the falling yellow, to remember that last warm walk at Lincoln Lake, to chuckle over the frayed red and orange stars that swish back into the office entryway each time I sweep.
I cherish the Christmas season with all of its crisp hope and peppermint. Still. I need to pause a moment before December hits this week, to revel in all the falling yellow, to remember that last warm walk at Lincoln Lake, to chuckle over the frayed red and orange stars that swish back into the office entryway each time I sweep.
Autumn, above all other seasons I think, reminds us that things on this clod of Earth simply don't stay still. But it also speaks of the beauty present in dormancy, transition, and rest. Its details offer a simultaneously whimsical and wistful picture of change--orange leaves blustered from the oaks along 49, floating above the highway before swinging out of sight.
"Leaf Litter on Rock Face" is a recent find from the Poetry Foundation app that balances the wistful and the whimsy of the season in a way that I found both delightful and thought-provoking:
Leaf Litter on Rock Face
Related Poem Content Details
Things are not
unmoving (or else what
is ing there for?)
The things once-living
fall on the never-living
all the more movingly for the eye
that passes over them.
The wind wells up
to spill a trail
of onces off the nevers,
take opaque from eye
to mind, or near it —
every rocking takes some leaving
to a stonish spirit.
