Fall arrives and I am preparing for my yearly ten-day birthday retreat into silence. Some prayers and tales reflecting about 9/11.

October moves into November and so begins my favorite time of year. 

The clouds that have been missing here for most of the summer come back into our skies. Great, lush cumulus and stratocumulus build, gather and tower along the mountain ridges to our north. There are days of wispy mare’s tails to watch as they evanesce. Mornings of patchy mackerel skies backlit with splashes of cottony salmon pink.

The white-crowned sparrows return to visit the feeders in my windows, filling my yards with their sweet plaintive whistle-songs. The third flush of roses in my garden offers up the largest, most exquisite flowers of the year. Each one a magical, fragrant kinetic sculpture as it lazily unfurls its voluptuous self in one of the blue glass vases on each of my altars.

The light begins to change. It has a sweet, burnished softness to it. The trees and chaparral vibrate with golden radiance in the late afternoons as I amble along in the canyons.

More of our days begin to have the crisp edge of autumnal briskness.  On the still-quite-warm days, the sunset now brings a different, sharper chill with it. Wafts of wood smoke return these evenings, nearly as intoxicating as the spring orange blossoms (though I know it’s not nearly as easy as they are on our air quality).  It’s time again to begin taking my fleece wrapped hot water bottles out to warm my sleeping bag at night. 

Even in this sunny California valley, there are still some trees that color up into intense reds, deep burgundies and bright, rich yellows.  As I walk the Shelf Road trail that overlooks our tidy little town this week, I can almost imagine it’s very, very earliest fall in a sleepy New England village.

Mid-October brought our first rain of the season.  A “woman rain.”   Sweet, soft, gentle and steady all day and night.  Welcomed.  Cleansing.  I plugged the carbon monoxide detector back in that day, unwrapped the shawls that (in summer) drape my wood stove and built my first luscious, mesmerizing fire of the season.  For the first night in quite a while, I slept inside because of the weather. (Usually I sleep outside in my mostly-mesh tent unless it’s raining or the wind machines are on to keep the orchards from freezing.)

I find myself noticing and luxuriating in having more hours of the darkness and night that I love so much, welcoming the growing stillness that comes with the dying of the light. I stay up later into the nights and can sleep later into the mornings now that the heat of the sun doesn’t chase me out of my tent so early.

I’ve spent much of the past month tending to a badly injured knee. I’d stumbled and fallen hard on a very rocky, fairly steep downhill trail on a high ridge overlooking the ocean. I’m used to stumbling and even to falling (it seems to be a family trait!) so, I usually fall “soft” enough to not injure myself. This was the hardest fall I’ve ever had. A five-point landing: two knees, a palm, an elbow and my nose!  A first! 

My little self got so scared and shaken. I was with a friend who knew to stand away, to let me be with my little one by my self until I was ready for help. I rolled over, sat up, checked to see that everything still “worked” and let my friend know nothing was broken.  Inside me, I comforted the little one. I told her that it would be okay. I told her that I was so sorry we hurt our self. I told her that I was here with her, that it wasn’t her fault, that no one would yell at her, that I loved her very much and would be happy to take care of her, no matter how long it took for her to heal. (All of this so different from earlier times in my life when I would repeat the cold, irritated blaming invective at myself that I’d learned from my mother’s reactions to my injuries or illnesses.)

I was able to walk the almost 2 1/2 miles to the car at the trailhead. (Wearing the knee brace I always carry with me for emergencies!)  We even stopped for a brief errand before I got to an icepack and then drove myself home from my friend’s house. The swelling in my knee was enormous. I could feel how seriously I’d damaged the tendons and knew it would take near to a month to heal. I tended myself so lovingly with rest, ice, compression, elevation, Chinese plasters, arnica, Triflora gel. I went for acupuncture, physical-therapy style and nurturing massages. (Incredibly grateful that I had the blessing of enough money, at this moment of my life, to afford the costs of such valuable help.) I asked all my friends to send healing energy to my knee. And, I lived without my walks, hikes and yoga for three weeks.

It was a chance to see and appreciate how well I’ve learned to live in the middle of what is rather than what isn’t. I found myself at peace with this time of relative immobility. I didn’t seem to be missing or yearning for the walking or the yoga.  Instead, I found myself reveling in how much longer the days seemed when they weren’t broken by time out of the house.

Whatever in me is nourished so deeply by the time in nature, by the stretching and moving of my body, that part seems to have reserves to draw on from inside of me. It does not collapse. Then, when I can start walking again, every movement in my body, the stirring of the natural world in every one of my senses feels so brand new, so exquisitely luminous and delicious! I feel drunk, vibrant, enormously grateful for every part of this still functioning body of mine.

With this same grateful delight, I begin to prepare both my inner and outer spaces for the coming of my now traditional ten-day November birthday retreat.  Ten days of silence–no phones, no email, no people contact, no chores, no errands. All in my own precious cottage and in the mountains and canyons all around it. This is always a time of sweet reflection, of offering gratitude and thanks for all the blessings in my life and year. Often, it’s a time of intense creativity, too. Always the silence and deepened solitude bring rich, profound nourishment and renewal for my soul. And, of course, this year there is more than the usual need for that nourishment and renewal.

I’ve found myself reflecting these days about how we learn to live with and in the middle of the still growing chaos and uncertainty of these crazy and crazy-making times. How do we live fully present to ourselves, to all of our feelings, to the moment and to what our particular paths ask of each of us in the middle of all of this as it continues to unfold?

An old Zen story that has always spoken to me keeps reverberating in my mind:

A monk, wandering through the forest in meditation is suddenly set upon by a pair of tigers. He gathers his skirts and begins to run, trying to keep some distance between the tigers and his mortal body. Running fiercely, he soon finds himself at the edge of a great precipice, the tigers close behind. In an instant of choice–certain death or the great unknown–he leaps over the edge and into the void. 

As he is falling through space, his cloak snags on a branch sticking out of the cliff wall. Caught there momentarily, swaying in the breeze, he spies–blooming on a vine just within his reach–a lush, ripe wild strawberry. As the branch from which he is hanging begins to pull away from the cliff wall, he reaches over and plucks the berry. Rapt in joy, suffused with the exquisiteness of the berry filling his mouth and his senses, the branch separates from the cliff and he resumes his falling.

A prayer that came to me in 1990 also keeps reverberating in my heart, it seems right for these hard times:

Invocation to the Grandmother Spirits

We call to the Grandmothers and the Great Grandmothers,

and to their Grandmothers and Great Grandmothers,

and to the Grandmothers and Great Grandmothers who came before them,

and to the Grandmothers and Great Grandmothers of those

          who came even before them.

We call to all those spirit fore-mothers who simultaneously hold

           and  are held in sacred concentric circles of woman energy

                            remembering.

We call all those Ancient Ones who remember in their own lifetimes

           knowing the blessings of the fullness of woman-energy,

                           manifest and reverenced,

           knowing the time of wholeness and balance and freedom.

And, we call to all those who came after, who more and more faintly,

           yet still within their deeps, can remember re-membering

                          the before-time when all was different…

when all was within the circle of wholeness with no divisions.

Sacred Guardians, with deep yearning we ask you, please, we need you…

Come sit and encircle us…Let us be nurtured by your empowering presence

            as we share this time together…

Hold us in sacred safety as we find our way to re-membering all

           we have forgotten…

Support our remembering that to know and love all that is in ourselves is

          always our first purpose.

And, then, something very special came in an email today: 

What We Feed In Ourselves:

A Native American grandmother was talking to her granddaughter about how she felt about the tragedy that occurred on September 11, 2001.

She said, "I feel as if I have two wolves fighting in my heart.  One wolf is vengeful, angry, violent.  The other wolf is loving, compassionate."

The granddaughter asked her, "Which wolf will win the fight in your heart?"

The grandmother answered, "The one I feed."

Originally published November 2001