It's hard to write when you censor yourself...which is what I'm doing now. Sitting here, staring at flashes of orange from those pumpkins up there and watching the cursor blink at me, demanding "write. write. write." with each appearance, I think of all the reasons I shouldn't write the many things on my mind this week. So, I'll share some pictures and what ever's left after that... let's see...
I've been doing a lot of walking lately. It could be that I have so much on my mind...but it's become a meditation of sorts. While I was in the city I walked for practically every hour of daylight and even into the night. Back in the valley, although the necessity is gone, the novelty of walking through these little neighborhoods makes me feel peaceful and takes the monotony out of living in the isolation of suburbia. It gets a bit lonely. I miss the paradoxical simultaneous anonymity and familiarity of faces on city streets.
But the transition from summer to fall--that sense of change that happens (in New England) so suddenly--always makes my insides swell with possibility. Maybe it's the sense I get from looking at the leaves change that things around me are maturing, shifting into something that seems aged and full of a rich season of growth. As I watch them let go and drift off their branches, I think the leaves are telling a tale of surrender. Autumn never strikes me as a season of wilting or dying, but as the embodiment of this perfect surrender to the flow of life, symbolizing this peaceful release to the next phase. Changes are happening within me and without. I'm trying to be with autumn this year, physically...metaphysically... 
Being with my family isn't always easy for me. There's something about being in close quarters with people who know you so thoroughly; interactions have a tendency to get skewed with assumptions and things we take for granted about one another, sometimes it's tough to really see people clearly through what we think we know. I am both the culprit and the victim of this phenomenon. Every day I challenge myself to look at the members of my family with clean eyes, as if we are just getting to know each other. Because, really, what do I know about them? In fact our interactions are all new! They are at new chapters in their lives and I've never been so surrounded by them, so immersed in their lives...at least not as a hyper-aware adult--I've been away from home for the past decade.
It's making me a better person to attempt this and I want to do it with everyone in my life. Every conversation should be new, every interaction a surprise. After all, people have a right to change with each passing day. One of my favorite Emerson moments from Self Reliance...(and one that I constantly quoted in high school to explain away my fickleness): "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds...With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think no in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you say today.--'Ah so you shall be sure to be misunderstood!'--Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? ...To be great is to be misunderstood." The beauty of approaching familiar people with fresh eyes is that the misunderstanding would never occur, because the projection of assumed behavior would be absent.
The most tangible results from this experiment have been seen in conversations with my father. It's been nice to get to know him as a man, as a person, outside of "dad"...there's more to him than just being my father, after all. I suppose if I can keep this up the possibilities are limitless for my relationships.
I strive to give people close to me the space to be whatever and whomever they feel like being from one day to the next. We can shed our thoughts, convictions, patterns of behavior, habits...we can let them fall like the leaves in October, new buds will always form. Ever the same tree... but how absurd to think that a 60 year old sycamore should have the leaves it started out with? Quite.
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