as the light wind lives or dies

You know how, sometimes, you get this feeling? It creeps into your bones like running sap through the maple trees in February, this feeling that slowly wakes you up from your long frosty sleep, this feeling of deep anticipation, the steady beat of a coming, unspecified change.

Most people, I think, count their years by the calendar, starting January First. This is normal. And although I too feel the change that comes with each New Year's Day (and usually hate it -- New Year's for me has historically been a source of burdensome guilt as I feel obligated to review all the things I didn't get done the year before, and how little progress I seem to have made, and all my unfixed bad habits -- I mean, gosh, don't we get enough pressure from St. Paul without adding secular self-improvement too?), my years really start in September, on my birthday. I feel in September a thrill a little different from, a little more intoxicating than, the guilt-laden one which I associate with Janus: a newness, a freshness, a chance to start over, or go forward, or both. The time to reflect, recollect, gather forces for what's to come, and look around in bright anticipation.

I don't know what a birthday is like for someone not born in the fall; I imagine there are wonderful seasonal implications to every birthday. For my part, I love an autumnal celebration. I was born at the close of summer and the beginning of fall -- the doorway season, the dying time, the sharp tang of resurgent life before the slow settling down of the world toward winter. Maybe that's why it's my favorite season -- fall brings back memories of homemade cake on the picnic table under the turning leaves in an air spiced with ripened grapes.

There's also the rather beautiful paradox of birth in the time of death, extending not only to the whole realm of nature but also to me: While the rest of the world began to sink toward sleep, I woke up. Perhaps because of that, and because of the anticipation of exciting things to learn every September at the start of school (freshly sharpened pencils! an array of virgin pens! unbroken binders! textbooks to cover in brown paper!), fall carries for me a strong sense of newness. When the leaves lose their green, they aren't dying; they're becoming what they are. Only in the absence of chlorophyll can they reveal the colors worked into their DNA from the moment of their sprouting. Apples come to their fruition. The air cools. The days fade more quickly. And, near my birthday, I can usually be found walking as close to the woods as I can get, in a beat-up red jacket with my pockets full of Cortlands.

I don't mind being indoors in summer, when the outdoors tend to bake and broil; but in the autumn I can't stand to be inside. I want to see, hear, smell, touch, taste everything I can. I want Walt Whitman's oneness with the universe on crisp or misty fall days. I want to let the rest of the world, by which I mean my consciousness, fall away, and exist, for a short time, only in the here and now, with no past and an exciting, but nebulous and therefore happily unthinkable, future. In fall, more than any other time, I love the present.

Autumn is change. As I leave behind the dog days of August and look forward to the ruddied, frosted Indian summer days of September, I feel that running of the sap in my bones. One of these days I would love to "go on walkabout," some "cold and damp white morning"-- shoulder a backpack, zip up a jacket, and start walking, heading nowhere in particular, leading a hobo-esque existence for awhile, just to lose myself in the season.

Adult duties hold me in place, of course, but there's always the dream, something fanciful to fix on as I make copies or write letters at work in a windowless office. The change is coming, and in my mind I'm out and jumping in piles of whispering fire, I'm eating apples and swinging my feet over the emptiness below the branch of a tree, I'm following a creek to nowhere and watching for herons, I'm crunching my way through a forest shimmering with falling leaves, the bared branches a ragged tapestry patched by the incredible blue of cirrus-brushed sky. I might dutifully answer the phones, smile and chat with clients, but I'm not really here. I'm out and exploring a world vividly alive and filling my pockets with pebbles and leaves. I'm roaming stubbled fields and examining every bird and salamander, every ripple of water, every turn of the light, secure in the knowledge that what's coming is only better than what's now. In autumn, I am expansive and immortal, recreated and free.