It is past peak where we live in Vermont, and until there is snow that lasts, this season is officially called “stick season”. All of the red leaves are down. Most of the orange are down too or are otherwise in that in-between of half up/half down, like shadow mirrors that circle the base of the trees in circles. A witchy skirt reflected. Quite a few yellow leaves are still up in places, in clusters, which is lovely and I think perhaps enough to attract the straggling peeper.
But we are in between seasons now. And you can really feel it. The in-between. The annual wobbly yet determined descent that lays low everything that was bright and light about the other half of the year. Low down and into the deep now.
I am sitting in the fading and dusky light of a Burlington athletic club parking lot waiting for Maple while she flips and turns, stroke by stroke, breath by breath, back into all of her parts. An embodied Maple. Last week we gave up the ghost- or rather, saw clearly all of the ghosts that had never made their way to her swim team experience after Wisconsin. We threw in the towel and as a family made the call (and the sacrifice) to move her to a proper swim team a solid hour away. We chose to give her a chance and a solid option in terms of what swimming can be for her. For the sake of better coaching, better communication, and feedback that offers development potential, we now drive even further.
Early last week we made the first trip down so that Maple could do an assessment swim. She worked hard and showed up and was seen for all of it and more for the first time in actual years. And an amazing thing happened. I watched her have maybe her first real moment of reclamation ever. She re-membered how it used to be. And all the grief of how it hadn’t been for so long was finally safe for her to feel. She let it out, my strong brave girl. The pain of leaving and losing something essential that feels like you. The horror of realizing that you had been pretending that everything was ok, was working, all this while, when now you can see that it clearly was not. She chose herself and her most true desire over the not-good-enough substitution she had been settling for.
And there are so many stories like this for all of us really, right? The great pretending. And subsequent forgetfulness. It is strangely easy to lose ourselves in one way or another and on repeat. A little giving here, a touch of aquiessing there, a push too long or too far. And I recognize that it seems perhaps like I am talking to you here, or maybe even moo. But really I am talking to me. Forever. And again. We have to be vigilant. But first we have to learn how to be vigilant. We must learn the difference between wanting something to be one way, and what it is to really have clear sight of our reality.
This season of the in-between, the descending energy into the dark and into the cold and into the night is a great teacher of remembering. At least, I believe it can be. A descent into the darkness always runs the risk of laying us low and right down into the grip and the grab of our shadow tendencies. And behaviors. But I think if we can culture some more stillness, more silence, into our rhythms, then we can see what is true in us.
I have been padding around in the dark. Waiting for some remembering for so long now. Like a shadow of a shadow inside myself. And it is strange, or maybe it is perfect, that now that the nights are truly long and the colors have almost entirely faded, I am beginning to perceive some luminescence still clinging to me in parts. A sparkle along my arm. A streak of twinkle and shine slipping across my spine. The light is here yet. Of course. And it is funny that as much as I think myself the lightkeeper and the guide out of the darkness for our children, I am not. Nor have I perhaps ever been save for when they were very small. They are their own. They walk themselves out of the shadows or choose to linger a little longer. Their call. I can try to blow on the ember of a fire but if it is not mine I cannot force a spark. I am the torchbearer of my own path back. As ever. Which as a mama, is one thing to say, and another entirely to embody. I am working on it. All this life long. Remembering to remember that my light is vast and deep and wide and mine.