More and more I’m feeling a curving to embrace.  Rivers don’t pour in straight lines. They meander.  I feel as though I’m forming a womb with myself, an awareness of softening more and more as I curve to embrace.

Yesterday I saw a Monarch butterfly, a sign that fall is truly here.  He/she sat on the Rosemary bush as I watered the yard. We shared time and space.

Then last night I lay on my deck with Tiger and Bella watching for shooting stars.  I saw one but began to realize that wasn’t the point. The longer I lay there, looking up, the more I realized it didn’t matter if I saw a piece of Hailey’s Comet or not.  It’s so clear I have no control, and in that letting go, I released into the moment, this moment and the next, reception, simple as that – reception that comes with release.

Meanwhile beneath the deck there was munching and scurrying as raccoons, a skunk who pungently released, and deer, each filled their niche.  

Now this morning light comes to my realm with the turning of the earth.  I’m reading David Hinton’s book, Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry.  It’s about emptiness, about a poet revealing emptiness in his personal way.  Hinton writes: “And what is that emptiness? It is, finally the wild existence-tissue Cosmos open to itself, awakened to itself in the form of human consciousness.”  

What does that mean? I don’t really know but I feel a curving to embrace fullness and emptiness, night and day, life and death, wild and tame, the patterns and transitions harvesting what breathes and manifests in me, and there is ease.