1. Truth: What Jamie Greenwood said, that we can “Embrace the seasonal pull to slow down.” She posted this on Twitter the other day, a daily mantra, and it was just what I’d been thinking. This week or next the last of the trees here will turn color and then drop their leaves. It’s been a long, warm fall, but the mornings are dark so late it’s clear the long dark cold season is coming. I look at the trees and think about how easy it is for them to let go, to surrender to the shift. Even though they’ve just made one of the most beautiful things they create all year (other than flower and fruit), their gorgeous leaves of so many amazing colors, they are able to just let them go, fall to the ground and rot. They trust in the transition, don’t question it. My garden and flowerbeds go to sleep, the birds migrate to a warmer climate. Everything pulls its energy close, calls its power back, and enters a season of rest and restoration, necessary quiet and stillness that allows for the season of creation that will follow. Every year I say I’ll do the same, embody this wisdom, and every year I somehow get caught up in the speed of the season. Maybe this year will be different.

2. Truth: What Andrea Scher said, or rather what one of her guides told her, “Your only job is to breathe and not resist.” What a wonderful approach, to everything. Place your attention on breath, just like in meditation, and allow whatever might arise. Rather than burning up all your energy, applying all your effort to rejecting whatever comes, surrender. Trust in your own sanity, your inherent wisdom and compassion, your basic goodness, and know that you can meet it, whatever it might be.

3. Truth: What Janelle Hanchett said, in a post to Facebook about trying, that “there’s a part of us that dies when we say ‘Fuck it I’d rather fail than stay like this,’ and it’s the part that believes we cannot do a thing.” I spent so much time believing that hysterical voice that said “I can’t,” that thought keeping me quiet and numb meant keeping me safe, that thought being invisible was better than being seen. And yes, there are hard things, stuff is shifting and changing all the time, and we have to adapt and adjust. It’s painful, and yet…”fuck it, I’d rather fail than stay like this.” What’s the worst thing that could happen, right?

One wish: May we “embrace the seasonal pull to slow down,” and simply “breathe and not resist.” May we let go of our fear of failure and try anyway. And when we aren’t actively trying, doing, acting, making, may we know it’s still enough, as poet David Whyte wrote,

Enough. These few words are enough.
If not these words, this breath.
If not this breath, this sitting here.

This opening to the life
we have refused
again and again
until now.
Until now

Maybe the last berry of the season

1. Truth: “Rainy days and Mondays always get me down.” Depending on your age and cultural experience, you might not recognize that quote. It’s from a song written by Paul Williams for the Carpenters. As I was sitting here at my desk, wondering where to start this post, I looked out the window at the gray sky, and this line popped into my head. It’s true, seems to capture the discomfort I sometimes feel pretty accurately (the weather and work).

2. Truth: I need to take my power back. And yet, that isn’t entirely the truth because I don’t think I ever held my power to begin with — or rather it was so long ago that my own potential and strength and truth was internal, centered in me, that I can’t even remember it, barely got a chance to experience it before I gave it away. All I know is that it’s a shift that has to happen, even if it means burning it all down and starting over.

3. Truth: Step One is not worrying what anyone else thinks about it. If being myself, wanting what I want, doing what is the right and truest thing makes you uncomfortable or confused, too bad. I just can’t worry about that anymore.

One Wish: May we connect to our core truth and power, and be brave enough to let it lead us. May we have the confidence to show up, with confidence as Susan Piver describes it, “the willingness to be as ridiculous, luminous, intelligent, and kind as you really are, without embarrassment.”