The season of mists and mellow fruitfulness is come… and it’s stopped raining, for once. The forecast calls for ten golden days of sunlight, which is just… well, frankly, shocking.
We won’t have much time to look at it.
It’s the time of year when Busy lands on us with four playful claws, and bats us around, purring. It’s the time of tiny pebbles rolling to form an avalanche underfoot, and we best let it carry us, or in fighting, flail and be buried alive.
T’s countdown to October 1 continues, as she strains to whip her novel into shape… and then another needs to be finished after Christmas. D. has to present himself to a teacher training seminar at the end of the month, and find out what graduate courses he will be instructing. (Surprise! Teaching here is a “don’t call us, we’ll call you” type of proposition, apparently.) Juggling to keep everything in the air, at times the feeling is that we wish we could do one thing well — just one! Instead, there is a feeling of doing a half a dozen things very poorly indeed.
T. has a friend who is a yoga teacher who urges her to sit and breathe for fifteen minutes a day. She so far has been unable to surrender that much time to “doing nothing,” (her friend sighs deeply and looks to the sky) but she has found this poem, and is working on it…
You, Reading This, Be Ready
by William Stafford
Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?
Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?
When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life –
What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?
Happy Autumn
– D & T
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Thank you for sharing this poem. Good words.
Very nice poem. Happy autumn to you!
Best,
Paz
Busy has me in its claws too. BUt first frost has hit and ALL the tomatoes and peppers reside within our four walls just waiting to ripen and be dealt with in an appropriate manner.
Good luck in all the busy endeavours at this time.
Thanks for sharing the poem. Some how, I haven’t been very zen lately myself.
And great be photo! Well done!