How Does The World Love You?

How do You love The World?     How does The World love You?

Oh my goodness......people......here in the Northern Hemisphere the days are getting shorter. This last week, these mornings having my tea out on the deck requires slippers and a shawl. The color on the flatirons, in the cottonwood canopies, long across the meadows, is shifting, different; a flatter, golden, pale offering.

Squirrel_In_Cushion

Just as the birds are beginning to relax (they’ve fledged this year’s generation and many of them are heading south soon) The mammals begin to pick up their pace; building nests, hoarding. I have a cushion out here on one of the benches that is a particular favorite of the squirrels because it’s filled with a polyester material they steal to line their leaf hammocks. Just the other day the black tomcat was lazily sleeping on the cushion while one of the more ballsy squirrels was inside the fabric cover, inches from the cat, ripping the fill into shreds and hauling it off. These are the signs of change, of ‘something’s coming’. They are all around us. And they are in us too, if we listen.

PumpkinRipening

This is the time when, if we are paying attention, we will notice a co-mingling of excitement (the biggest harvest of the year is still ahead of us) and an understandable fear, perhaps even a deep rumbling dread. Winter is just around the corner. The Earth is tilting away from the sun. Like the scene those parents among us will never forget, of dropping our child off at daycare and being forcibly wrenched from each other in order that life can go on, if I slow down long enough and listen deeply enough I can feel this level of longing, of ‘oh no!...don’t go away!....don’t leave me....!!’ But life will go on and for the next 3 months the sun will share less of its shine, its love, with those of us up here in the North. Yet even here, in the darkness, there is an equally critical process of Life happening. Even in the Death, there is Life happening. This is essential.

If you are one who has a hard time in the snow and cold, this is an even richer time of possibility. How do you find a deeper relationship with this time than simply, “I hate winter”? How do you involve yourself more intimately, invest yourself more fully, than simply seeing this coming stretch of months as ‘ski season’? Just one layer in further, beyond ‘ski season’ or ‘I hate...’ lies the awareness and process of a relationship. An interaction. A reciprocity. Even if it’s a reciprocity you have a hard time with, whose offerings do not feel kind to you. Here is where our true human experience lies. In our deep relationship with everything.

How do You love The World?  How does The World love You?