Living on the sun and why we love the Fall

Whhhhaaat, where did summer go?  Yeah it’s gone. Except the sun. The sun is still here in full force, making us folks here in Southern California wonder if it would be that weird to start wearing ice packs in our pants.


In fact, I think the sun has suddenly realized that summer is on it’s way out and has decided to have one last hurrah at our expense. You know, sorta like when kids find some deranged interest in watching bugs sizzle on the sidewalk under the heat of a magnifying glass.  That’s what we are now, sizzling bugs.  What is it outside, 194 degrees?

But fall will be here in no time, bringing it’s own mysterious sweetness with it.  And why do we all love Fall so much?   I think it might have something to do with the memories it evokes from childhood with the beginning of a new school year.  It’s sort of untouched in that way, a new day so to speak….yet simultaneously quite old.  It’s death in nature, a dying of leaves and life, which is rather morbid I suppose.  But also so natural we are drawn to it at our deepest core and probably aren’t even sure why.

I was born in late October, and was often envious of my friends who had summertime birthdays.  But despite my resistance to it, fall always seemed to run true inside of me, resonating in a way I could never quite describe.  It still does, and I think it might have something to do with the knowledge of light, darkness and depth inside my own self and the world. The need to illuminate the reality that beneath the soles of my feet there is an unfinished-ness about this world, a rawness that cannot otherwise be felt or known, and that there is some strange beauty intertwined in it all.  It is mysterious and strange and naked. Whatever it is in those leaves, wind, or that damp and dying earth, something inside me understands.


Or maybe it’s just the smell of new school supplies or those damn pumkin spice lattes that take over the world every second of September. You never know.