The race is on. That balancing of energy, resources, time and the sky falling. It is the pressure that I feel the need to reevaluate every step I am taking many times a day. As the days transition into weeks like watercolors that never dry, I feel the changes in the season, my surroundings, and me. 

I am hard-pressed to find a time of year that has this much transition.  Is it because this is where I come from or is it the same for everyone?  Just up around the bend in the trail, I see Mr. Steinbeck’s apt word painting in which the remorseful Floridian transplant feels the pain in his stomach, thinking about what he sold to get there. The “warmth of kitchens” indeed sir. You rock.  I wish to honor it with words this year.  To breathe the natural wonder of it all, connecting soul to words.

The real trick of course is to balance, not letting one thing upstage everything else. Holding these days upon precarious rails that at any moment become like the void of space in which an object pushed continues further from everything else unless intervened. Autumn is tactical.

The fall always fascinates me.  Over the years of ink poured out, I have charged it with being a predator, a storm that threatens dark days of loneliness and regret, reflection, birth, excitement, and anticipation.  I know that it is all of these.  Inside I scream at myself to be responsible, then wait!  Not so fast. “January me” grasps me and shakes me to my senses, telling me that there is no power like there is right now.  There are some tasks that can still happen in the winter and other things that cannot even exist. Choose carefully, my biggest critic awaits me on the path 90 days up the trail.

Our adaptability is fantastic and disastrous at the same time.  It is the pausing from the currents of daily life that we have to plant our feet in the riverbed and stop with our eyes closed, forcing the white noise from our senses. Then, starting over, senses rebooting, looking, and listening. It is incredible to me just how much we can block out. Despite the gauntlet of sensory pirates, I white knuckle the wheel, hoping I can hold the line of what autumn will look like to me when I turn back in January and look back upon it. 

I try to tune it out, but I know that the current is increasing. I feel the weight of it’s power pushing against me. I won’t admit it, even though physics dictates that once there is enough power in the flow, my feet will break from the ground and I will land in January with remorse. The question is: how much?