All Souls Day

Friday, November 01, 2013

The rain came after I left for the office. So the wiper washed away the bird poop that had decorated my windshield for days

This was after I managed to clear the leaves that blocked my window washer, but poop always eluded the wiper blades and so remained like a tattoo on the glass.

This All Souls Day, one of those magical moments when the world changes for me. The rain fits the day and my mood – although Friday being Friday all the lunatics are loose on the roads. It will be worse going home after some people leave work early for a little pre-weekend nip.

This is such a routine that I sometimes see the same people driving home each Friday doing what they always do, and I learn to avoid them – the way I do potholes.

This is a day of sadness for me, the kind of bitter sweet sadness I get when I see leaves falling from the trees after a long summer.

Something is over and gone, and will never come back. What we will see in Spring – if we make it so far – will be utterly new, looking a little like what we saw before, but not the same.

Nearly all of those closest to me in my life had passed away in the months between All Souls Day and Easter, as if the symbolic dying winter signifies bears fruit during these barren months.

But something also dies inside me at this time of year, leaves from blooms I had seen rise from seedlings in spring, now perishing.

I am as predictable in this manner as the drivers I avoid on Fridays, knowing that I am always most inspired at the first buds of spring, and feel inspiration work up in me through the summer and come to this point in the year when I wearily concede to the change of season, and must find rest.

These are not dismal thoughts I think as I steer along these Jersey City streets. They are merely a random collection of feelings I have come to expect, knowing that something will happen within a few days or weeks that will send my life in a new direction, and that will show signs of growth when spring emerges.

The sadness is in the air with the sudden gushes of rain, wind shoving hard against the car as I plunge through the puddles.

What is shed at this season, must be shed, should be shed, in order for new things to grow. Yet it is still hard to let go of the old, knowing that even in their decay, they still show signs of their one-time value, and even when fallen, these things make up the soil for some new, perhaps more successful growth.

We all grow stronger after we have let go of that which no longer has value in our lives, and out of the past emerges the future, hardly predictable at all, no matter how many life times we have lived and no matter how much we have learned from past lives. We are always plunging through the dark of winter into the unknown with the hope we can survive until we see green again.