If You Believe The Sky

November is when things happen

I posted this image, the one of the clouds and musings about the November sky, on social media a few weeks ago, and it got more engagement than anything I’ve posted in awhile. I don’t say this as an example of “how to get more engagement on social media” because that’s not something I care to think about much. Rather I offer it here because even in a month that can be tough in myriad ways, from lengthening darkness (for us northerners anyway) to continuing violence in so many forms across the globe to holiday stress to everyday worries like the increasing cost of….everything….

Things are happening. Not just tough things, either.

Good things, even, sometimes.

What things?

All sorts.

I went down the the banks of the St. Croix last week after meeting a friend for coffee and checking out her studio, and the water was glassy and gray, under a flat gray sky. At a glance out the window, pretty drab and uninspiring. The sort of weather that makes you want to stay inside under a blanket. Enough mist in the air to notice it. But the river had something to say that day, and I was glad I ventured down to the banks to listen.

If you believe
the river,
gray days
in November
are when reflections
rise from stillness.

Then yesterday the temperature dropped pretty sharply into the 20s, and the wind turned cold. The sort of day you want to remember where you stashed your winter gear when things warmed up back in the spring. The sort of day that makes the cat’s lifestyle seem like the best choice (i.e. curled up in a little nest by the woodstove for hours). But it was also a day of new possibility. Eva and I took to the newly frozen marshy bits of the ground by the lake, because when the temperature drops is when you can finally make it to the floating bog that’s too squishy to traverse when it’s not below freezing. Through the crispy reeds we went, and we saw beavers, watched otters feast on fish (from afar), and pretended the sandhill cranes soaring overhead were dinosaurs, or perhaps dragons, returning just for a moment from the realm where creatures go when earth is no longer hospitable to them

¹

.

We found that place
under a November sky
where silence stretches out
to absorb the trill of sandhill cranes;
to meet the splash of beaver’s tail
from the reeds; to join the path
of four journeying otters
pausing for a midday fish feast.
We were reminded to see beauty
in that which fades, in that which persists,
in seeds that float away in the cold wind,
in creatures who make ready for winter,
in creatures who live only in memory.

We found things happening, possibilities unfolding, life moving through us, alongside us, and around us. Things happening. Some good, some hard, some uninspiring, some awful. Some impossibly beautiful, too.

From Collisions of Earth and Sky:

The world may be both incredibly beautiful and terribly sad, but our work in it continues. In that work is the necessity to pause to be able to work another day. I can only hope that by fully grieving the unbelievably sad and allowing ourselves the stillness necessary to do so, we add another layer of depth to the impossibly beautiful.

To stillness, noticing the undercurrents, and being open to what else might be possible.

What’s happening where you are?

1. otherwise known as extinction, which is clearly not something to take lightly, but to counter the grief of heavy matters while also working for change, sometimes it’s helpful to imagine other possibilities. Also I’m reading When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill. Watching for dragons is as good a reason to keep looking all the way up as any, in my opinion.