Pain From An Old Wound

Autumn makes me nostalgic for other autumns, falls to which I will never return and the whole world is dying, the leaves surround us, so beautiful in their final hour. I would take such loveliness over the spring given my nature -- I long not to be renewed mostly because of my own moral failings and laziness -- growth is a lot of work and often painful, but to be reminded of other times. And I suspect I am not alone in this -- most of the spells that show up in books and that people search for are about making lovers return and about remembering the past or forgetting it, presumably because it is too painful to endure. The present often doesn't hold up -- we are too close to it and need too much from it. Only sometimes can we see it for what it is and then we lose it by the very act of observation.

We are thoughtless in the fall, the season of pumpkins and mischief and the colored lights that line the windows, the witches that have flown into trees. It's the time of masks and spells and costumes; we can hide ourselves, lose ourselves in nostalgia, which began as a medical term meaning pain from an old wound. The trap of nostalgia is that we cannot return to the place we long for -- it is time and memory and doesn't exist. The leaves crunch under our feet, so brilliant in their hues. We can collect them, of course, press them into photo albums, take pictures of them to our heart's content, but we can never capture the abundance.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see." Martin Luther King, Jr.

Cocktail Hour
Drinking literary journal suggestion: Gertrude

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Friday! And happy birthday to my mother and a toast for when I see her again, together in Heaven.