Autumn Spandana

THE soothing sanity and blitheness of completion,
The pomp and hurried contest-glare and rush are done;
Now triumph! transformation! jubilate!
Walt Whitman

Life is both dreadful and wonderful.
Thich Nhat Hanh

...was inspired to pick up a book called Adventures of Maqroll, by Alvaro Mutis, after seeing it mentioned in Yoga Bitch...(though, as it turns out, I got the wrong book...a sequel, I think, but that’s okay)...(everything’s a sequel and prequel to something or other, I suspect)...about an old-time wandering adventurer, doing’ his thing in the modern world.....inspiring, predictably enough a wanderlust in me...

...but, then, that’s typical for this time of year...the time for hunkering down, preparing to hibernate...a resistance to natural cycles I suspect may be every bit as natural as the cycles themselves...

...right now feeling ponderous and creative, if not with any particular object...wanting to be an adventurer of the mind, but with mundane work that needs to be done, in the service of bills that need to be paid......always that conflict between practical matters and the passions...vocations and avocations...and how easy to get stuck in the middle, not doing much of anything, stagnating...though that, too, might be one essential half of a pulse...spandana...

... have some tentative plans to get away this winter, along with the requisite financial insecurities making those inadvisable...and, anyway, right now they all seem so tame...not like working on tramp steamers of dubious legality or in haunted coal mines where I’ll have traumatic experiences that’ll leave me in the kind of deep, romantic despair nobody describes quite like those great Latin American writers, who understand so well that life is unspeakably funny and unbearably sad at the same time...

Falling....

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
Gerard Manley Hopkins

Let it loose, let it all come down....
the Stones

In the Autumn of 1985, I saw Stanley Jordan, the jazz guitar player, in Boston, and his opening act was this comedian who poked fun at all the people driving around New England looking at “foliage.” What they were going to so much effort to see, he pointed out, was nothing but decay and death—which is true, in a way, but, ya gotta admit, those leaves know how to go out in style....

The soothing sanity and blitheness of completion,
The pomp and hurried contest-glare and rush are done;
Now triumph! transformation! jubilate!
Walt Whitman

That in mind, this could be a good time to look at some things that keep hanging on, but just might be ready to drop off and die: old hatreds, maybe, or unrequited loves and lusts, old anger, old frustrations and disappointments, old wanting, old losing, old getting, old insults, old flattery, old thoughts, old beliefs, old masks, old lies, old sadness, old wounds...to let it all out in glorious color, then watch it fall and turn to mulch....