More Fleeting than Fall
Slow down + see what's inside
Hello friends,
Last week I led my second-to-last garden meditation of the year, and before my baby arrives. The air is getting chilly here, and this is the season of melancholy / the witch / embracing darkness / navigating change / meditating in falling light. At these monthly autumnal gatherings, I tend to a small campfire as we sit and breathe with plants moving into dormancy, just like us. It’s a vibe!
We’ll gather to meditate once more in November before I go dormant (though I won’t be sleeping, lol!) for a few months… Please join us if you can!
While I’m thousands of miles away from the voluminous, voluptuous brilliant changing leaves I grew up with, believe it or not there *are* some changing leaves in LA. You just have to be open to seeing them.
My daily drive to drop my son at school is lined with some maples which are subtly changing. It’s a mlid twinge of color, since the air isn’t that cold and the sun is still so bright. But I see it. I see the shift. Deep down we know change is always happening - we just have to admit it.
The green is fading into warm-hued rainbows and eventually into death, then nothing.
But what is our why?
For those of us creatures in the northern hemisphere, the rotational tilt of earth is moving away from the sun. This initiates the season change which brings a shift of sunlight: days become shorter / nights longer and sunlight becomes less direct. Temperatures drop in our lives.
Trees, and the entire natural world, catch the drift. They slow and eventually halt their production of chlorophyl, which is what they’ve used to photosynthesize these many months: absorbing sunlight and turning it into nourishment. Chlorophyl is what makes laves so green.
I’m a high-chlorophyl high-photosynthesis person. By this I mean I’m almost always “online” in some capacity. I’me literally awake at 4am writing this right now, as I have been several mornings prior. LOL. I’m not just doing a lot (we all are), but absorbing and metabolizing a lot. I know this is actually my natural state, which is a gift and a curse. Sometimes it’s too much and sometimes it’s the most, and of course not always or even often in a good way.
But photosynthesizing near-constantly and staying very green — ready to absorb and make hay while the sun shines — makes me happy. I don’t mean being “over-extended” exactly, but feeling alive and awake and “firing on all cylinders” (whatever that may mean to you, personally). When I’m feeling kindest toward myself, my brain feels like the most perfect baleen of giant magic whale, taking in huge gulps of ocean and filtering out all the most delicious krill.
When I accept myself as is, I see my brain as a giant sieve that catches essences of spiritual and philosophical ideas, business ideas, logistical details, tons of random peoples’ names and birth dates they would never expect me to remember, passions and interests that I don’t really have time for, and so on. It’s fun and overwhelming, and I’m proud. Though can be exhausting to myself, and annoying to others — like my sister who points out that I am a stickler (and unfortunately I am!).
Multi-tasking feels like conducting a symphony to me. It actually is one of my flow states. It’s beautiful, but it’s also necessary (to *some* degree). But, nothing can continue at its current pace forever. Slowness and dormancy are metabolic requirements and seasonal imperatives.
For a tree, this is initiated by the season’s change. With less sunlight comes a waning opportunity for photosynthesis, and a dwindling need for chlorophyl. They read the room! Chlorophyl production stops and it starts to fade. Other things — shades — emerge. This SPACE allows for alternative processes to take place, or, rather, to be seen. This metabolic downshifting reveals, literally, other chemical compounds in the leaf… that were always and already there.
Like xanthophylls, which present a yellow hue, and carotenes, which bring an orange-y red. Slowing down means showtime, baby! There are also new chemical changes that start to take place amongst the sugars trapped in the leaves, which release new, brilliant reds.
Here, slowing down doesn’t mean completely, it means opening up to other possibilities and perspectives. The leaf changes color in the sense that it reveals itself more fully. Slowing down allows some inherent, buried stuff to be revealed while some new stuff alchemically transpires. Transformation.
But you gotta slow down first. You have to loosen your grasp on your chlorophyl.
Meditation does this. That’s why I love it and it’s so damn hard.
I’ll never forget a dear one’s description of their meditation practice as devastating because once they finally sat they were bored to tears realizing, “it’s just me.” Damn if that isn’t it!
There’s a lyric from a Saves the Day song, “My Sweet Fracture,” that goes:
“Called my mom last night. She said, ‘Sweetie, you don’t need someone who’s more fleeting than fall.’”
[Chorus]: “Don’t you love those leaves? Don’t you wish the orange stayed forever?”
It was the perfect, biting break-up song in Autumn 2001 when I turned 18, the Twin Towers fell, and my grandfather died. On a chilly Boston night, my on-again-off-again first love put the lyric up as his AOL IM away message (IYKYK) after some fight we had, and of course I knew it was about me / us.
It was a mic drop that stung, though he was right. My emotions and energy were fading away from him as I was adjusting to a new season of life. I didn’t want that to be true, and hadn’t admitted it to myself, but that doesn’t change its truth-ness.
Thank god we change, as Lama Rod Owens reminds us.
Every day more we live on this gorgeous, apocalyptic earth, we are initiated into more and more change. Like a great rain shower. Growing up and growing older is an experience of witnessing and owning your own changeability. It’s a process of taking accountability for your seasonality.
Meditation, or simply mindfulness, helps with this, because it is a space to notice what the hell is going on. My personal goal here is to transition from someone being rolled by the waves to someone surfing them. The waves are still them same waves, baby. But less fear, more skill, more practice, and so on. Experiencing and initiating shift as less wishy-washy, flippancy, thoughtlessness and fear-based, and more mindful, deep, seasonal awakening.
Back to slowing down, which obviously I’m avoiding (um, can I wrap this up?).
I am trying to slow down. It is in my cross-hairs. But again, slowing down is hard - let’s name it. Most of the time, doing helps me justify being. I think that’s why I try to do so much. It’s like I’m thinking, “if I’m not producing chlorophyl constantly then I’m not a leaf!”
This is absolutely 100% faulty logic.
The very truth of being a leaf is the cessation of chlorophyl, the crisping and falling, and the disintegration (and eventually growing anew in a new leaf form).
My son builds with magnatiles, these plastic squares and triangles that have magnets along the edges that help them connect to create structure. But if you’re two, and you’re not yet inducted into the world of structure (bless!), it can be hard at first to put them together. It’s hard to make a right-angle corner so they’ll stay — it’s a practice to create a learned skill. My son plays with them often on his own, and while he’s learned to build many things, as he strives for more sophisticated structures, I often just hear him muttering an exasperated, “haaaaaard!” to himself.
This is good, and this is true.
That’s what slowing down is like, for me. But it’s a necessary, metabolic process for turning inward to birth a baby. Energy must be used elsewhere, for very critical purposes. I don’t consider zoning out or vegging out to be slowing down. As much as I wish I could count all the hours I spend eking out full seasons of Real Housewives or Sister Wives as “slowing down,” it’s not really.
Slowing down is doing less without dropping out. Slowing down requires intention and awakeness. It’s noticing a changing season and allowing yourself to see how this impacts you. Slowing down is having the courage to allow for what’s beneath to be revealed.
So as we sat around this little fire last week, we practiced slowing down. Literally, in the body - taking slower inhales and even slower exhales. We considered what slowing down means to us.
A very dear one said to me the other day “slowing down for you looks like…” which was a good reminder. Slowing down doesn’t look (or feel) the same for any of us. I often find myself judging my slowing down, because it doesn’t look or feel like someone else says it does for them. I must be doing it wrong.
Discernment is critical — be absolutely honest and straightforward with yourself. But judgment is whack, let it go.
And when you do, even for a moment, see what other chemical compounds are revealed. See what new transformations have space to take place. I’m in it too, so I’ll see you there.
