Poetry, Seeds and Senescence

Excerpted from my September 2024 newsletter. 

Poetry

I’m always keeping an eye out for signs of shifting seasons. Looking at leaves is one of my favorite ways to notice small shifts. Leaves are almost everywhere in nearly every ecosystem. I find them to be sweet little invitations into presence. They nudge me to slow down and zoom in on one aspect of the natural world, and often remind me to pause and check in with myself, too. I wrote this poem about my ritual of observing leaves:

Ritual

In each new place I look at the leaves.
Some are gray and withered, others gold or green
The round spots of fungi, holes, split lines along veins all say
I have been here long enough for here to change me
May I stay half as long.

Writing this poem  helped bring me into the present and into contact with myself and my surroundings.

If you’d like, find a nearby leaf from a tree or plant, sketch or paint it, then write a few lines of poetry about it. How does the leaf seem to be changing? How does your internal state change through the act of observation and presence?

Spotted around the yard: Seeds and Senescence

Though it’s been a long time since I’ve been a full-time student, I still work and teach partly on a school year schedule. The beginning of the school season still surfaces a feeling of excitement, nervousness, and potential. I find myself yearning for a new notebook and fresh pencils. Symbols of beginning again, of turning inward, of learning, which is reflected, too, in the landscape starting to prepare itself for autumn. In Northern California, grasses deepen into golden dryness, flowers drop more seeds, and the cottonwoods are starting to turn. This harvest, I’m walking around with fresh eyes, seeing the same plants with new awareness, watching the seeds fall and imagining the new growth that will come with the rains. I’m taking a moment to reflect on what I’m hoping to harvest and plant in the coming year, both in the garden and in the metaphorical realm of my creative life.