at autumn's threshold

Have you started to notice the shift?

I wake at the same time I have for months, but lately darkness is sleeping in. When I open the door to let the dogs out, there are bottom notes in the air — coolness, melancholy, and the faintest scent of endings.

Autumn is arriving.

The majority of the Monarchs left town last week. A few strays linger, landing on asters in all their fall glory. But the zinnias grow more weary each day as their edges curl and brown. Meanwhile, the bees, wasps, and soldier beetles are throwing a final late-summer rave on the goldenrod. I’m amazed, watching so much life dancing on its tips, that the goldenrod doesn’t buckle into a backbend under the sheer weight of the party.

Autumn is my favorite season. During the most brutal Midwest summer days I pine for fall. And still, when it arrives, there’s always that familiar ache resting low in my belly. Is it some primal warning, carried in my nervous system, inherited from generations of farmers in Arkansas and before that in Bavaria, and Belgium? Perhaps this restlessness has served for millennia as a reminder: prepare because winter, with its darkness and cold, is coming.

Standing on the door jamb of my back porch, I feel it all at once: the cool air against my cheeks, the slight scent turning toward decay, the whisper of endings.

Perhaps this is what thresholds do best: they remind us of both endings and beginnings, of restlessness and renewal. The cool gust at the door, the curling edges of zinnias, the goldenrod swaying under its late-summer party — all of it whispers the same thing. This restlessness I carry is no accident; it is rooted in my body’s memory, an inheritance that returns each autumn — reminding me to prepare, even as I stand at the threshold of what cannot yet be known.

Winds of Autumn

Even in a person
most times indifferent
to things around him
they waken feelings
the first winds of autumn.

- Saigyo

invitation to slow

The next time you step outside and feel the shift in the air, pause at the threshold.

• Take a slow breath and notice what your body registers: coolness, scent, texture.
• Ask yourself: what in me is ready to prepare? Let one small answer surface.
• Then ask: what in me is not yet knowable? Allow the mystery to remain.

Linger in the tension of both — preparation and unknowing — and trust that the season will reveal what you need in time.