When You Find Yourself in Autumn Endings

Why are autumn endings so difficult? Do you find yourself there? Holding on. Squeezing tight.

Refusing. Refusing. To. Let. Go.

I have never found leaves very successful in refusing to drop in the change of seasons, so why do we attempt it?

Here in the desert, we have finished the bold bluster of the summer monsoons and have not yet arrived to the season of the gentler winter rains. Winter, in the desert, is the time of preparation for the beginning of spring.

But we are not yet there.

We are not yet in the preparing. We are not yet in the beginning.

We are in the autumn of endings.

The hard season of letting go.

The Western Diamondbacks are preparing to hibernate. Kangaroo rats are stashing up seeds for the lean months ahead. Costa's hummingbirds are moving out altogether until rains return once again to the desert. With the exception of irrigated gardens, the soil for desert plants has dried out.

Nature enters into autumn endings in an established rhythm year after year.

Me? Not so much.

I am all about the adding. Not the subtracting.

I forget the importance of endings, the ceasing of what has always been done to make room for the new, the rhythm of life God has created in the change of seasons and the not rushing to so quickly fill the emptiness. (Once I let go, why do I so quickly want to fill the emptiness?)

Oh, it is such a tension! Clinging to the point of ridiculousness and then the jumping in too fast.

No resting. No reflecting.

No breathing.

"We don't need to fight them," Adam S. McHugh writes in The Listening Life. "The seasons relieve us from the pressure to put on the same face and act the same way all year round."

(But I like the same face, thank you very much. I've had the same haircut for like...eight years.)

McHugh continues, "We can cycle through our own seasons of dormancy and new life, activity and quietness, celebration and sadness, blossom and harvest, openness and being closed, austerity and abundance."

Where are you this season?

What are you refusing to let slip into autumn endings?

Grace as you finally let go.