This video is set to excerpts from these three poems and also a recording of my sibling (cello) and my mother (piano) and her dog Daisy (claw-scurrying on the kitchen floor), playing Arvo Pärt's "Spiegel im Spiegel" for my 50th birthday.

Linda Pastan, "October"
Who can mediate
between the body and its undoing?
At night in each of my limbs
I feel the skeletal tree ache,
and I dream of leaves
in their feverish colors, floating
through the small streams
and tributaries of the blood.
At noon in the smoldering woods
I gather black grapes
that purse and caress the mouth,
I gather thistles and burrs-
whole armfuls of dissolution,
while from a branch
the chuck-will's widow calls
forgive, forgive

Marie Ponsot, "The End of October"
Leaves wait as the reversal of wind
comes to a stop. The stopped woods
are seized of quiet; waiting for rain
bird & bug conversations stutter to a
stop.
Between the road
and the car in the road and me in the car,
and the woods
and the forms standing tall and the broken
forms and the small forms that crawl there,
the rain begins to fall. Rain-strands,
thin slips of vertical rivers, roll
the shredded waters out of the cloud
and dump them puddling to the ground.
Like sticks half-drowned the trees
lean so my eyes snap some into
lightning shapes, bent & bent.
I leave the car to wee where, lower,
the leaves of the shrubs beaten goldleaf
huddle together. In some spaces
nothing but rain appears.

Whatever crosses over
through the wall of rain
changes; old leaves are
now gold. The wall is
continuous, doorless. True,
to get past this wall
there's no need for a door
since it closes around me
as I go through.

Czeslow Milosz, "This Only"
A valley and above it forests in autumn colors.
A voyager arrives, a map leads him there.
Or perhaps memory. Once long ago in the sun,
When snow first fell, riding this way
He felt joy, strong, without reason,
Joy of the eyes. Everything was the rhythm
Of shifting trees, of a bird in flight,
Of a train on the viaduct, a feast in motion.
He returns years later, has no demands.
He wants only one, most precious thing:
To see, purely and simply, without name,
Without expectations, fears, or hopes,
At the edge where there is no I or not-I.

POETIC THEMES
Last week I woke up and noticed my front tooth is turning gray. There's a meme of a tree in its full glory with the message, "The trees are about to show us how beautiful letting go can be." Last October I saw it and it struck me as very poignant. This year I saw it again and, for some reason, it made me furious! Something between Covid or my dog dying or my kid leaving for college or maybe perimenopause - who knows - calls bullshit on the beauty of letting go. I's not beautiful. It's just plain HARD. In a poem entitled "In a Northern Country," Linda Pastan confesses, "I'm tired of the way the seasons keep changing, / mimicking the seasons of the flesh which are real / and finite." Amen, sister. There's a fatigue that I recognize in Pastan that keeps me company. It's an exhaustion with the deterioration of the flesh. In "End of October" she wonders, "Perhaps beauty / is the mother of death, / not the other way around." There's a kind of crone-wisdom in perceiving that truth can be toothed, arresting and still tender. Nothing can mediate the ache of undoing as we watch our colorful leaves float on down the river. Buh-bye Youth and prettiness! Living is an exercise in loss, as we break down to skeleton. Still, the grapes that purse the mouth also caress it. Knowing as we do that we can't hold the world forever, our "armfuls of dissolution" are spiky, bristled - not pussy-willows but thistles and burrs.

In the autumn of our lives, not only do we experience minute by minute the dissolution of the body, but also an increased feeling of urgency to give up the ghosts. The rolling call of the nocturnal chuck-will widow, with all the implications of loss implied in its name, is beautiful until it is crazy-making, persisting as it does all. night. long. The cadenced onomatopoeia haunts us with its insistent repetition to forgive, forgive, before it's too late. The hard work of forgiving is not, in fact, about someone else's behavior, but about surrendering to our own past. What has been will be, and we need to decide what we're going to do with it. There's nothing complacent about forgiving; it's about making peace, in the sense of actively forging something out of nothing.

Marie Ponsot's "End of October" is another dissolution poem, where the leaves are low to the ground. The skeletal trees are in lightning shapes; all that is left are the leaves of the shrubs, huddled low and beaten gold. The transformation of old leaves turned gold gives a sense-based experience of the liminal, in the spaces between raindrops, between car and woods, between the witnesser and the autumn leaves, between human and animal. To enter this rain-drenched scene is not to pass through it but to become different in it - the doorless wall partitioning stages of change is continuous, and it closes around us as we move through. We huddle together, bent. 

A depiction of this transformation, "This Only" enacts a distillation of our needs as we age, redefining what is precious. The poem looks backward and forward at once, to a past winter when a traveler visited a valley down in the forest. In this first visit, some epiphanic moment dissolved him into the natural world. But the poem is set in autumn, with winter still to come. When the traveler returns years later, there's no sublime epiphany. It's more of a streamlining of need. "He wants only one, most precious thing / To see, purely and simply." With age we discover a kind of pure dissipation of self into our surround, the dissolving of ego that enables pure witness. At this edge, beyond and yet definitive of self, there is no fear or hope, only rhythm and joy and reasonlessness. From the perspective of the autumn of our lives, that time of year where leaves, or none, or few do hang, we can look forward to our winter crone wisdom that privileges presence - only. We are whittled down.

In an episode of "On Being" with Krista Tippett, John O'Donohue describes this process of distilling and streamlining, in the etymology of the word "threshold." Coming from the verb to thresh, to separate the grain from the husk, he describes the threshold as a line that separates "two territories of spirit." As we transition from one way of being to another, O'Donohue draws our attention to the question of how we cross over. To cross "worthily," he says, is to heal certain patterns of behavior that had us stuck or caught. He concludes, "It's a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life." The kerfuffled verb tense of this last line recalls Milosz's: we are returning home to a memory of our future as we always knew it. The word "worthy" is an interesting choice, Biblical as it is and the root of the word "worship." What is it, then, to cross worthily? Perhaps it is to attend to every micro-detail, each worthy of our attention, so that we may dissolve what is and join with whatever future thing awaits. To worship every autumn leaf is to fully inhabit this threshold of change, this period of crossing over that promises the dissolution of ego and the discovery of true presence.

PRACTICE
Expressing the "skeletal tree ache" in movement is to find the sway inside stillness, the certain sadness in the extension of limbs. We could express longing and limit by reaching out our arms and gathering them back in, like Pastan's "armfuls of dissolution." There's a kind of threshold play in a physical exercise exploring boundaries: bringing your hands to the center of your chest, interlace your fingers, flip your palms to face away from you, and as you push the hands away, round your back and drop your head. It's sometimes nice to linger in this extension, maybe lifting one shoulder at a time. Then turn the palms to face inward and gather the interlaced hands back to the chest, lingering again as you receive the warm imprint of the palms on your chest. Go slowly, so you might check in with the space between letting go and longing and receiving and releasing again. Whatever crosses over changes. Notice the shifts in the streams and tributaries that flood from the heart center. Tune in to the flow of blood and energy from the trunk to the branched tips of fingers. Could you drop in deep enough to find Milosz's"edge where there is no I or not-I"? What does that zone feel like and how does it relate to forgiveness?

The last two weeks in class we've been prepping for, working with, and recovering from eclipse season. This week's solar eclipse was in Libra, themed around balance, especially in the scales of justice, according to my favorite astrologists Mindy Nettifee and Chani Nicholas. It was the third in a cycle that began - guess when? - October 2023. Occurring on the axis of Libra and Aries (sign of fire, ruled by Mars, the planet named for the God of War), this signature asks us to locate an imbalance in our lives, collectively and personally, around where we fight and where we capitulate. All eclipses happen in one of two "nodes," North and South, and the ancients conceived these nodes as the head and tail of a dragon. The North node dragon mouth is about the advent of something new, something that's being hungered for, and the South node dragon tail signals something that is ready to fall away, something in need of release. Maybe we're being asked to question what it is that's worth fighting for and where we need to back down or surrender our needs or wants or convictions. Maybe we're being asked to interrogate where we fall on the continuum between fight and surrender, in order to let go of some conditioned tendencies in a way that might bring more balance, as individuals, as a community - maybe as a planet.

Traditionally, South node eclipses happen subtlety, in the quiet dark places of our psyche, in ways we might only be able to identify in retrospect. But this week I had a not-so-subtle exchange that kept me up (as eclipses will do) and has me thinking and wanting to share. It was, I'm sort of embarrassed to say, an exchange that began on social media, as some of the least productive skirmishes do. But over the course of the private conversation that ensued, I experienced the felt sense of movement from both parties, shifting and coming into a more subtle understanding and a greater intimacy, as the best conflicts do.  

My Facebook "Friend" (capitalized because this is a fellow Quaker) posted that the word somatic is being recruited willy-nilly in redundant ways. "Somatic" just means "embodied," she pointed out, so the term "somatic yoga" is meaningless - yoga is already about the body! I responded with an earnest attempt to describe the function of the term. Of course yoga is a practice of thousands of years originating in the Indus Valley with whole-self spiritual transformation at its center. That's just not what yoga means to most Americans anymore. Adding "somatic" as a descriptor for a yoga practice might be an attempt to specify a certain set of intentions or approaches that are different from, say, tightening the skin under your chin to eliminate unsightly jowls, or stretching your hamstrings to avoid back pain. Somatic work is interested in studying and shifting the whole organism of our being, by working with patterns in our bodymind and soul. It signals a trauma-informed approach; someone with a history of trauma will not necessarily or automatically heal by lying on their backs and bringing their feet together and knees apart. Being ordered or forcing oneself to do so might in fact retrigger and cement habitual patterning. In that awareness of how to recognize and approach forms of harm and work towards healing, Somatics has naturally ventured into territory at intersection of the personal and the systemic. It's a field that envisions broader forms of transformation through healing. Many somatic practitioners have their sights on healing at the micro and macro levels, in a way that bridges embodied practice and political action. Attention to the body reveals that it's not enough to change our opinions or even - I know this is controversial - to take political action. Write to your senators, yes! Show up at the rally, sure! AND BUT there is also work to be done in how we might better align our dreams for the world with how we actually show up IN the world: how we connect, what vibes we give off, how be behave under pressure. As we bring our soma into alignment with our values, we experience a fractal rippling outwards - we feel the shifts in our primary relationship, our families and friendships and neighborhoods. Hopefully over time we begin to notice signs that this ripple effect follows the laws of physics, also changing our communities and country and globe. 

And especially as we reckon with the political intensification as we approach election season, if you're doing All.The.Things "out there," but you're noticing relational stickiness - if you're NOT experiencing growing intimacy and understanding and depth in your closest relationships and the communities that matter to you - it's a sign that something's off in your approach and needs recalibration. Like, for example... when I got a whiff that my Friend experienced my Facebook response as a sanctimonious soapbox lecture, I immediately changed approaches and reached out to her privately with an attempt to contextualize what I was saying inside a specific set of emotional needs - "please see me I feel invisible!" - and relational needs - "hey, we've taught retreats together, trying to bring more embodiment to Quakerism... are we still connected in that purpose? I care about feeling connected to you because I super respect your work, and also it's scary to feel alone in this!"

And I invited more collaborative investigative play into the important questions her post raised - YES, capitalism will absolutely appropriate every possible meaningful term! I see the word somatic used in ways that do seem meaningless or even antithetical to the purposes I've been trying to describe. 12 Somatic Tricks that will Make Your Butt the Envy of Every Woman at Your 20th High School Reunion! But it's not always this obviously exploitative. Is that workshop you just saw on Instagram called "Somatic Hiking" for a hashtag that will help sales? Or is there language about incorporating embryological movements like creeping, crawling, and swimming to explore embryological and developmental movement outdoors, to deepen our direct experience of nature? Because the first thing ain't gonna get my 75 bucks but that second... fuck yeah!  Could we identify some signs that help us flag appropriative or exploitative uses of the term? Like, create a little rubric together? Is it for weight loss? FLAG! But hmmm... the focus on beauty... When I don't want to host a somatic photography workshop that promises to get women in touch with their natural beauty, I'm like... nah. Our work is about internal experience, not appearances, even if it's dismantling the strictures of The Beauty Myth. But... is that allergic reaction really just a form of internalized body-shame, especially given our spiritual taproot of Quakerism, with its austere, puritanical standards for living into Simplicity? It was lingering with questions like these, together, that catapulted our dialogue into our shared heartbreak around the lack of any attention to embodiment within Quakerism. This was the original source of our connection I was hoping to feel. Not as a return to beginnings with no progress, but as a spiral towards feeling more complexity and nuance in a vision we've always shared - of this awesome, radical faith of ours making space for the wild embodied ways of being that earned us our name as QUAKE-ers in the first place. The vision that I wanted to rekindle, stoking the common ground from which we could act - from a connected heart space.

Maybe the spiraling movement I'm trying to illustrate with this story of conflict, repair, and deeper reconnection is what is being burnished inside the refiner's fire of this eclipse season. How can you bring your operating system to function not just from the head space this culture reveres and requires, but from its alignment with the feelings in your heart and the intuitive knowings of your gut? Between last October, the second eclipse in March, and this week, have you become more aware of what's at the dragon's tail? What do you need to release to bring those three centers into balance, as a springboard for spiraling growth? Has spirit sent you any hunches about what you might be ready to let go of, to make space for the bigger alchemical transformations this world is so ready for?

To help you engage that self-study, here's some poetry, thoughts on seasonal release, and somatic practices to help with this process, from this week's entry in Thinking Feelingly. 

"To the Light of September," W.S. Merwin

When you are already here 

you appear to be only 

a name that tells of you 

whether you are present or not 


and for now it seems as though 

you are still summer 

still the high familiar 

endless summer 

yet with a glint 

of bronze in the chill mornings 

and the late yellow petals 

of the mullein fluttering 

on the stalks that lean 

over their broken 

shadows across the cracked ground 


but they all know 

that you have come 

the seed heads of the sage 

the whispering birds 

with nowhere to hide you 

to keep you for later 


you 

who fly with them 


you who are neither 

before nor after 

you who arrive 

with blue plums 

that have fallen through the night 


perfect in the dew


"The late year," Marge Piercy

I like Rosh Hashonah late,

when the leaves are half burnt

umber and scarlet, when sunset

marks the horizon with slow fire

and the black silhouettes

of migrating birds perch

on the wires davening.


I like Rosh Hashonah late

when all living are counting

their days toward death

or sleep or the putting by

of what will sustain them--

when the cold whose tendrils

translucent as a jellyfish


and with a hidden sting

just brush our faces

at twilight. The threat

of frost, a premonition

a warning, a whisper

whose words we cannot

yet decipher but will.


I repent better in the waning

season when the blood

runs swiftly and all creatures

look keenly about them

for quickening danger.

Then I study the rockface

of my life, its granite pitted


and pocked and pickaxed

eroded, discolored by sun

and wind and rain--

my rock emerging

from the veil of greenery

to be mapped, to be

examined, to be judged.

excerpt from "Humors," Part III of Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum

But if that dangerous humour ouer-raigne,
Of Melancholy, sometime making mad,
These tokens then will be appearing plaine,
The pulse beat hard, the colour darke and bad:
The water thin, a weake fantasticke braine,
False-grounded ioy, or else perpetuall sad,
Affrighted oftentimes with dreames like visions,
Presenting to the thought ill apparitions,
Of bitter belches from the stomacke comming,
His eare (the left especiall) euer humming.
​
If we call autumn "fall," maybe we could call this fifth season "lean." Late summer, so replete it can't even hold up its own fullness, is yearning downward for earthy rest. According to Chinese medicine, the fifth season is associated with the stomach and especially the spleen, which is not only part of digesting the ripe harvest, but also controls blood vessels, keeps the organs upright, and governs clear thinking. Medieval medicine in the West shares the view that the spleen is the center of physical imbalance in this transitional season.

According to the system of the four humors, the autumnal season of melancholy can cause imbalances of stomach and spleen, whose symptoms are described in the Regimen Sanitatis. Even if your left ear isn't humming, if your pulse is not beating hard (as Marge Piercy puts it, "in the waning / season when the blood runs swiftly"), the tendency toward pensive introspection as the light shifts at the end of September might be familiar.

If this sounds hypothetical rather than experiential, try listening to Arvo Part's "Spiegel Im Spiegel as you read Merwin's direct address "To the Light of September." In that violin croon, I find all the sweet melancholy of the golden lengthening light, with its morning glint of bronze. But that might be because I listened to it a lot when I was hospicing my dad into the next world. The days still feel like "the high familiar endless summer" marking September as an interstitial realm, seasonally, "neither before nor after." Something precious is slipping through our fingers as we reach out to hold the last of summer. We have nowhere to hide it to keep it for later. The cacophony of springtime birds has died down to a whisper. The sage is in seed. The ground is cracked, and the shadows are broken. The plums are falling. Perhaps so are your spirits.
​
While this downward, inward pull is almost Buddhist for Merwin (Is it too much to read an implied theology in his existential-ish riddle of a first stanza?), Piercy's "The Late Year" adds a sense of reverential dread appropriate for the Days of Awe, counting the days toward "death / or sleep or the putting by / of what will sustain." The sense of impending doom in early autumn refigures chill mornings into stinging twilight. The frost is a premonition and the creatures are alert to danger. Merwin's birds are whispering, whereas Piercy's are davening. Rosh Hashanah's call to repentance gives a very different feel to this season and to the sense of bowing down, leaning in to perceive our life's granite rock face with frank reckoning.

THE PRACTICE

The grace and sadness of sidebends! In the fifth season of "lean," we might explore the relishing extension of the limbs and the arcing ribage in a sideways bow, a drop of an ear toward a shoulder, a downward turm of the chest that isn't fully frontal. Even as we turn in and down, there's the feeling of reaching, yearning, for something. Anatomically, we are growing the gith of the ribcage to allow for a bigger breath, but simultaneously squeezing the organs. Our focus-not just the gaze, but the tonal focus-can be upward, looking up to relish the light, or downward, like the yellow stalks bowing to the cracked ground. As you engage these stretches and pressure points, note the subtleties of emotional tone—for me it bends between sadness and bittersweet nostalgia.

Try sitting with one leg extended in a straddle and the other knee bent out to the side, leaning toward the straight leg. Rest your head on one hand fif the elbow doesn't reach your leg or the ground, bring the earth up to you with a big pillow). Flop the other arm loosely over your head in a way that doesn't require muscular effort, or rest the hand on your bent knee. Breathe into the top ribs for one or two minutes, then switch sides.

Or, if you are inclined towards bigger movements, engage a supine whole-body side stretch, with arms extended on the ground overhead, creating a crescent with with your whole body. Perhaps cross your ankles and bracelet one wrist with the other hand. Or you could start in a fetal position on one side, open the body through center (with feet together and knees apart, while windmilling the arms on the ground overhead), and close the body back to fetal on the second side.
​
However you come into the side ribs, close by stimulating the acupressure point for the spleen. Bring one hand, flat-palmed, just below your armpit, and use the other hand to feel around just under your pinky finger and a few inches below for a sensitive spot. Spend just a few moments gently tapping or massaging this point. You might go medieval in this practice by imagining black bile draining from your side waist, down the side of your hip, and into the earth, taking the melancholia with it and bringing you into balance.