World in Peaceful Brown

November’s coming, and with it the irrevocable change. Gone are so many of the landmarks of beauty we have depended on since blossom’s first opening. This saintly, hollow beauty remains, a scattered, blurred collection of the bones of growth. We can reach so far now into the once electric forest, see so vastly into the bare shoulders of the valley. The leaves, quietly moistened by an icy rain, broken over by a few frosts, linger limply, clinging to path bends, jammed into rock wall crevasses. Goodbye to the sparkling Autumn, so easily sliding us away from Summer’s long soft embrace. Welcome in the quiet brown, the deep peace of a reflective long night.

Inside, I’m simmering down like the countryside. I used to wear my cause on my forehead, now it’s somewhere deep in my heart. Out of the throat, and into the living, values become as the word implies: valuable, a treasure for life, a jeweled pair of speckticles through which our heart peers. The flagrant, creative energy hasn’t stopped, nor my new fisthold on life, but the trees are barer, the explosion quieted. Whittle away a Winter, he’s on the tails of this peaceful bare-knuckle time when only oak remains clouded in dull orange and barely red. I’ll be okay; the growing season, though tempestous, was fruitful in the end, was giving to me rather than taking from me all along. For that, I am most certainly grateful.