Every September I say it. It’s the most beautiful month of the year where I live. Summer is still here and yet the evenings are beginning to cool. Soft breezes visit often. Wild flowers fall about lazy and flourishing in their rich colours. Spectacular cloud formations make the skies endlessly entertaining. And the light – the light of September is its greatest gift: soft, translucent, dreamy, gentle.
If I could pick one month to keep around all the time, September, you would win.
This morning I'm moving about my place, finishing coffee and packing things up for work, and I'm stopped still by the sun showing itself, suddenly, in a mirror.
"Good morning," the sun says. "What's your hurry?"
"I'm glad to see you too," I say.
When I was a little girl, I was enchanted with a foggy morning. Mist, with it's silvery, lavenderish cast, was more beautiful than the sunniest of June days. I would run to school imagining I was an angel running amongst the clouds, filled with energy as if the close air enveloped me with some new and everlasting oxygen.
The fog still calls to me and I still go half expecting to find another world.
The changeable weather continues to create wonderful drama in the sky, right over there in little ol' Toronto Harbour. All these photos were taken with minutes of one another. So many people walked under that double rainbow, oblivious to its existence. It got me to imagining how many times I might have walked under a rainbow without noticing it. It's kind of a nice thought.
There's been a conversation over at Selma's about her need to, and her method of, surrendering to the divine. It got me thinking about times when I decided I needed to surrender over to what I call the universe. I associate the experience with "the universe," as I said to her, because I can experience it most significantly by way of subtle movement, a tipping of the flow somehow; its rhythms nudging me along in an uncharted course.
Funny thing is, like Selma, I've been enduring restless nights of crazy dreaming. Rodents have intruded into my sleep world; disfigured, injured ones. I'm waking up exhausted and jumpy and with a sense of gloom and foreboding that I can't seem to shake these recent weeks.
So I'm thinking about that conversation and my recent state during yoga today; and when I'm asked to focus on an intention for today's practice, it seems right to let go of the nighttime (and daytime) intruders on my peace. I decide to accept and work with the rhythms of the universe – in that studio and beyond; to ride the waves in a direction that is, perhaps, different that that I'd envisioned as "right."
As it turns out, it's the best yoga experience I've had in a long time. I focus. My body breathes into itself, and holds still and strong in the poses. I balance. Balance is something I've not found in that studio all summer.
I'm thinking about all that when that cloud passes across my window this evening. I watch it drift ever slowly east, inviting me to float along with it. If I dare.
I don't know how I will sleep tonight, but things are looking up. Or EVEN anyway. Kind of like the world is rolling along, and I might as well jump on and just sit back and breathe.
I'm enchanted by this marbley warped-glass look of the water between rains. One drop and everything changes…
My home is not a lot of things. Homey, for one. But when I go outside, this is the essence of it, for me. Coming, going, lolling about, landing, escaping, arriving, visiting, leaving, wandering. There is something about this perpetual movement that appeals to me. The vagabond in me.
After dinner I decide I want to go for a bike ride. I'm feeling like a nice easy evening bike ride, but find it's still kind of windy. Windy enough to get me not a little winded and wondering why my legs don't want to work harder than they do.
About halfway as far as I'd intended to go I stop to get these shots. Because I didn't have today's picture of the day; not because of yesterday's Pilates class.
A full weekend. Family, food, music, bikes, sun… A few images from a busy Sunday all over the place.