In Season

There is a certain feel to the seasons. It's something that permeates every moment, every breath, even in your sleep. In the Winter, you wake up and there is this cold, sleepy feeling to the world that is wrapped up in a long sigh of "huuuuuuushhhh." In the Spring there is a tense, anticipatory feel accompanied by a level of barely restrained, sometimes violent energy. Summer brings with it a bright, lazy, and languorous feeling, while in Autumn there is a sort of a bitter-sweet quality to the ever increasing sharpness in the air; so beautiful and so sad at the same time.

You can feel a season approaching in the air and deep in the earth before it even crests on the horizon. I think that this is because a season is always accompanied by immense changes. They're always difficult at first, with the shifting and sliding that happens until the season has taken a strong hold. Then it becomes easy, and you revel in the rhythm... until the next shift.

I tossed and turned all during last night's sleep, dreaming vividly of so many people from my past, that I actually feel heavy in my soul. It was as if my own density had increased threefold over night, pressing me down into my pillow. I awakened several times in the night simply trying to lift myself up. So many people, and all of them lost to me save one. Lost for different reasons, but lost just the same.

One in particular, I dreamed I came face to face with now. I dreamed that the others were sad for him, and when I saw him we reached out and laid our hands upon each other's faces and I felt how much had been lost. I literally awoke with tears on my face. He was no lost love of mine in the romantic sense, he was my friend. I know that his life has taken a very different turn, in a somewhat fearful direction last I heard. But that was years ago, and in truth I haven't thought often about any of the people who I dreamt of last night.

Even with such a dark night of dreams, this morning I awoke with a sense of Spring and Summer. It was as if I knew Spring was settling in, but I could practically smell Summer around the corner, hiding just out of sight. I laid in my bed, alone, for a long time just staring out my window. I remember those mornings as a child and waking to the Summer breeze breathing through the shade that had been drawn in my room. I used to watch as it blew forward and then suddenly sucked backwards against the window in a tight embrace, and think to myself that this was a good morning - just because. No matter how bad things could possibly get in the day before me, it was still Summer. There was still that bright and lazy air of everything being full of possibility, even if that meant doing nothing in particular.

Even though I feel very heavy with all my thoughts today, I can feel that Summer mentality starting to slowly seep into me. I know that this is really about a daunting level of change that has begun for me. I didn't expect it. Why would I? What is so special about this time in my life? I'm not exactly sure, to be honest. Yes, I am graduating in five weeks... but so what? I know that getting my bachelors degree was a big milestone for me, but it isn't attached to any great changes that I can see.

Yet the feeling is there. It's like being in a doze, but someone is knocking on your door so insistently you know you have to bring yourself to wakefulness and answer it. There is almost a sense of urgency about it, but you have no idea why that should be.

My children are older, and don't need me with such intensity as they once did. My art business has begun to flourish, and interest is increasing without my assistance. Most importantly, there is a feeling inside me of being unfettered for perhaps the first time in my life. It is similar to that first day of Summer when I was a child, and I knew I didn't have to go to school and face so many demons... but this is something more.

There are a handful of songs that I hold close to me, that seem to mean a great deal even with the effects of time weighing down upon them. I realized as I was writing this, that one song very much applied to my flow of thinking today:



Landslide was actually written and released around the time I was born. I remember hearing it as a child and just listening to it over and over. I feel as though this song has paced me throughout my life, and in reality it rather has. I always seem to go back to it.

I think my seasons are changing, and I don't know where it will take me. I believe that it is Summer that waits for me, but I'm not entirely sure what that will mean. I think it will be good, but in order to get to that place there is a landslide of changes that must happen. I already feel it, as though the sand is shifting beneath my feet, vibrating, and there is nothing to hold onto. It's so much bigger than myself, that I'm simply overwhelmed. It's beyond anticipation, beyond excitement, beyond pain and fear... it is all of those things, but more than anything it is the silence that comes with the sheer magnitude of foreboding and awe.

And so today I am heavy, and although all evidence above to the contrary - I find that I am choking on a deeper, overwhelming silence.