ungh

I taught my neighbor the phrase "existential weariness" the other night.

Things are going, generally, exceedingly well. Now if only I could banish this lingering exhaustion...sleep doesn't seem to help. Maybe it's just that it's that point in my monthly cycle where I'm losing more iron than I'm taking in, and caffeine isn't a sufficient supplement.

Or maybe it's my dreams. They're perennially weird, filled with the threat of loss, and I feel like even when I'm awake they crouch in the shadows under my eyes.

Or maybe it's the persistence of the hot weather. I'm ready for fall, like I was ready for summer, like I was ready for spring, like I was ready for winter. The seasons have felt out of joint this past year, and the not-rightness weighs on me. I can deal with life being chaotic and nonsensical, because that's life; but the seasons, well, they should do what they're supposed to -- they want to. What's wrong when they don't? So then the whole world feels cosmically off kilter.

But there are such beautiful moments. I've always loved autumn best of all the seasons, although I reiterate for the thousandth time that I love each season in its turn, and I've discovered something here in the upper midwest that I'd never seen before that's made me love it, and autumn, even harder: the beanfields. I love the beanfields in fall. They turn all kinds of different yellows and greens and golds and coppers, while underneath the leaves the stalks turn bronzes and browns, and this pied beauty runs all the way across the fields to the woods. We don't have beanfields at home, and every September my soul goes all shivery-wild at a glimpse of them here.

And this morning was cold and misty and sunny, and the sunbeams shot the world with these brilliant rays of light exploding from behind every tree and bush and cloud, so that the drive to work was like getting close to the resting place of the Holy Grail, or the announcement of the Second Coming like it is in the Bible, not Yeats. And the highway was bare and my window was down and the air smelled of field and mist and stone, and I thought, Some days all I want is a cold sunny morning, and a clear highway ahead of me. Nothing more.

It lifts the weariness for awhile.