As summer turns to fall, I enter a period of deep reflection. It has always been this way. Even before I discovered Robert Frost’s NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY, I had a deep appreciation for the importance of the time between summer and fall. It is that drop in the life-cycle of a calendar square that pulls at my heartstrings. And as day seeps away into the gloaming…that is the time when I want to scream. Look at me. Most people mix metaphors. Me? I mix poets and their poems. I’m just feeling so verklempt of late. I smell the changing seasons. I see these brushstrokes of hot orange and burnt sienna and mustard yellow in the trees about me and I ache inside. Now, more than ever. Because I know now that somewhere inside of me I am slowly turning to these colours myself. I have entered my own gloaming. And, yet, what have I done. I also continually imagine Jim Morrison screaming something about having a good world when I die.
Probably, Jim. Maybe. I don’t know, Jim. Maybe not. Leave me alone, Jim.
The gloaming…as beautiful as it is heartrending. The end of the day…
And then, don’t even get me started, I think of that song from Rent. Oh, you know the one…don’t pretend you don’t. Seasons of Love.
The mornings are a bit crisper, a bit more dewy. The sun often feels brighter this time of year…more piercing, just as it feels less heat-filled. Its glare seems more honest in September and October than it did in July. The year is winding down, and it is fighting against the inevitable…because the year is happy to be alive. And it gets happier the closer it gets to its own demise. As though it can feel the forever nap it is about to embark upon…and it rebels in the only way it knows how. It blows up into a miracle of colour and light.
“I am here! This is me! I AM.”
And the year, it is so desperate not to die. It holds a ghetto-blaster up in the air and it says, “Take me as I am…do not forsake me. I will love you, if only you will let me stay here…in your life…in your love.”
And the year that is slowly dying…it plays for us a song to keep our attention. To justify its staying when it knows it cannot. It tries to tempt and trick the heart. “I can stay,” the year says, “if you love me enough.”
How do we authenticate our lives? As the leaves burst into colour–and then later dry out and abandon all hope and wither to the ground–we too are changing. We may not know when, or why, or how, or where we die. But we all walk that Eventual Eventual. If we don’t contemplate our journey while taking it, what’s the point?
There is only one thing that matters. LOVE. The rest fades to black, as we ourselves do. The history of us eventually fades…but the love? Imagine love as a virus. It carries from one person to another and another and another. It is the one thing that doesn’t truly die with us.
Look for miracles…they are everywhere…
As leaves gather around your feet this autumn, remember that you will not be spared this great equalizing season. You are witness to the autumn around you just as autumn begins inside you. And when winter comes, be ready…at least in your heart. Let the things that do not matter fall away. It’s the only way you’ll gain ground for more love to enter.
As the last leaves fall, you will scream NOT YET, NOT YET, NOT YET! But you know…as sure as you live and breathe, you know!
Ponder your life. Forgive. Let go. Heal. And when you’re ready to shuffle off this mortal coil, remember one thing, my lovelies…DO IT TO THE BEAT OF LOVE and DO IT IN DANCE…
2015 hasn’t begun yet, but it’s just a sneeze away. With another year under our belts, we sometimes can’t help but reflect. All the New Year cliches come out of the woodwork. We either stay away from, or join, the nearest gym. We think about all the things we accomplished in the year that is ending, and all the things we failed to do. We think about all the things we hope to accomplish in the upcoming year, all the things we know we will miss out on.
It’s just that time of year.
2014 was my year of travel. I will probably never travel as much in one year as I did in 2014. I did British Columbia, Spain, Paris, New York, Quebec City and Orlando, Florida. Capped it all off with a swing-by of Stratford, Ontario this past weekend. (-:
The Vast Camino is filled with Places of Wonder!
I made many new friends and experienced too many phenomenal things to list here. I grew through walking across Spain on the trail to Camino De Santiago. I walked up mountains and down mountains and through mountains.
“Captain, My Captain!” ~ Sue Kenney, Pilgrim Guide to The Camino
I stopped to smell the flowers, to laugh, to cry, to make amends. I stumbled barefoot through mud and rocks and grass. I had a picnic like never a picnic was ever had before, or ever will be had again…at the apex of a beautiful hill, in tall grass with friends–fellow peregrinos.
To the Top of the World! Somewhere in Spain, on the Camino…A Picnic in Paradise – May, 2014. Spain
I met a man I hardly shared words with, but who made me weep like a baby, a pilgrim from France who had found more than he had ever bargained for on the Camino…the love of a million pilgrims and one. He was that special.
A Peregrino from France Who Changed the Lives of All He Touched on The Camino…
I shouted into the rain and walked through snow. And at the end of the long journey, I walked into a city more beautiful than any emerald one could ever be. And, by some stroke of magic, I saw all those I had met along the way. I stood on the roof of THE Cathedral and viewed that beautiful city in 360 degree splendor from that holiest of lofty places.
The View NOT of the Cathedral of Camino de Santiago, but FROM Atop it!
I walked the quiet morning back-roads of Galiano Island with the wild wind at my back and the Pacific Ocean at my side.
Morning Stroll on Galiano…In British Columbia, the Sun Explodes Both IN and OUT of the Day…
I saw Canadian flags wave greetings from boats in a tiny harbour there, while the Canadian Rockies in the background swallowed up anything else in my view.
The Galiano Inn – Home to the Annual Galiano Literary Festival
I stood at the top of the Eiffel Tower and scanned a city heretofore a mere dream to me…a fantasyland where Fitzgerald and Hemingway wined and dined and wrote and sang and lived. Never did Paris mean more to me than that, until I was there. It opens anew to each visitor, presents a unique place in the heart of each guest. I stomped up the Champs-Élysées with my new friend, Nina, and together we took on the endless spiral staircase inside the Arc de Triomphe and we stood at the top exhausted and filled with light and love and we smiled on the fair city that stretched out in fingers away from the tower.
Me and my new friend NINA, fellow LBWR registrant, atop the Arc de Triomphe!
Together we walked the Tuileries, and sat for mayhaps a little too long sipping red wine while the sun went down and the rats in the bushes beside us scurried.
We drank absinthe at a lovely little outdoor cafe, where we admired shoes and broke glasses and laughed until we were sore…nay, until we soared! With our group, THE LEFT BANK WRITERS RETREAT, we wandered museums, we took the Metro, we walked Montmartre, we wrote in Le Jardin de Luxembourg, we entered the great WORD CATHEDRAL—SHAKESPEARE & COMPANY. We entered Shakespeare & Company! After decades of imagining it.
Shakespeare & Company – Where words breathe
I don’t care that I am running on and on, for with each word comes another remembrance. My year. My year!
CHARLIE. And CHARLIE. AND CHARLIE. CHARLIE! In the midst of it all was born a beautiful boy. Little Charlie Bucket, who will one day know what that means.
CHARLIE THOMAS – Boy Wonder! Little Brother to EDWARD JACOB, the Wonder who came before him!
What it’s like to step inside Notre Dame Cathedral when it’s empty at eight in the morning (mark that down! At ten, the lines are so long you could die before entering!) is something that will stay with me for ever. It is a simultaneous feeling of being infinite and of being nothing at all. And to think, I stayed only a couple of minutes up the road from that most famous of cathedrals…the centre point of the old universe itself.
Notre Dame Cathedral in the Morning!
Later, I stood atop Rockefeller and looked down at the most famous park in the world and wondered at its vastness and its nothingness. A green thick and wild and in the centre of one of the world’s most thriving and populated meccas.
Central Park in fall…
And the lady of the harbour, I saw her too.
And to walk the streets of Old Quebec City after wandering the streets of Paris is to know the connection. plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Quebec City Streets – A Whisper of Paris
An ocean between the two places, and a hint of the struggle that came with building the second in the shadow of the first.
New and Old meet – Quebec City…the Wall
Each beautiful, each unique. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Everyone is a Child in the Magic Kingdom! DISNEY ORLANDO…a MUST!
OOH! Disney and Universal in Orlando. Something MAGIC this way comes!
Old Friends from Long Ago…Dr. Seuss is the reason I write. I had to meet The Cat in the Hat while at Universal in Orlando! (-:
I’m another year older, yes. But I’m also so much younger. I have learned a great deal in 2014. I am grateful for every new soul in my life. Each and every one of you!
I thought I would write a few words about my year and move on to Things to Come. Sorry…that just came out of its own accord.
So on with THINGS TO COME. What will 2015 have in store for me.
On January 19th, my 5th novel will be released! HALF DEAD & FULLY BROKEN won the Muskoka Novel Marathon‘s BEST YOUNG ADULT NOVEL AWARD! Now, it’s going to be available to all to read. It’s actually already available for pre-order at Amazon:
And don’t look for me come mid-March, for I will be in CHINA & HONG KONG…until April. (-:
What of THIS TOO SHALL PASS, you ask? This was something I always promised myself of all the bad things. And now it is something I realize happens also with all the good. So—grab onto every single moment you have. Every single one. Hold on for dear life and enjoy the ride. Whether it is good or bad, it is fleeting. This too shall pass…
KEVIN CRAIG 