48 – Found Falling In On Herself

10/3/22

There’s something about the fall that seems to rip me wide open.

I move so fast in the summer – 
get swept up in moving from pool to coffee shop to beach to bar to friend’s house, and I stop feeling. Stop listening, stop sitting, stop knowing.

But then fall comes and everything slows down and suddenly I’m impressed upon by every thought and feeling that I’ve been so efficiently evading for months. I recoil. I need more sleep, need more time to myself, need more moments of stillness.

I wrote this piece in December 2020, and I think it was the first time that I attempted to explain what I had started noticing in myself.

“I find
a different version of myself
in each new season.
Freckled,
passionate,
and carefree summer Leah
doesn’t know the word no,
and she’ll dazzle you with the lightness of her steps.
Autumn Leah
is oh-so studious,
so pensive –
intrigued
by each leaf that falls into her path.
Found falling in on herself.
The gray months of winter
find a Leah
who sits with herself in agony
and struggles to piece together
the bits of life around her.
Spring Leah
starts to get herself together
but only a little bit,
and she feels the growing pains
that winter leaves as it slips out the door.”

As I’ve come into greater understanding of this pattern,  as I’ve learned to walk myself through it rather than fight against it, I’ve fallen in love with this process of learning more and more of myself. It’s a good thing that we don’t stay the same. That even through the span of a year, we can lean into a loving curiosity that leaves us with more – more compassion, more understanding, more love. More clarity on the progress we’ve made, on the growth we’re still working towards.

I’ll ask – as fall deepens, who are you? Maybe you’re reeling like me, a bit exposed. Maybe the cooler weather brings you into yourself.

Unsurprisingly, I’ll leave you with an Austen quote.

“Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn — that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness — that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.”

Happy feeling. Happy thinking. Happy falling.

Lightly,
Leah