So many new things to discover

Fall foliage of splendor,

Here it comes again,

Like a letter from the sender,

Mailed to a friend.

Beautiful colors again anew,

Hello Autumn, I wholeheartedly receive you.

Spring has died and will rise again next year,

It’s the fall season, ample reason to cheer.

The football games, the cheerleader girls,

living to yell fight, fight, fight,

all drenched and tumbled in Friday night lights.

Remember bobbing for apples it seems now a lost art,

Someone once picked the candied apples now nestled in my shopping cart.

Leaves transplanted from green to orange, and yellow, to brown,

As Canadian maple red leaves gently glide toward the ground.

Please autumn, sing your beautiful song,

In the heart of your beats,

The leaves hit the streets,

With harmonies that can’t ever go wrong.

Rustic leaves all raked and gathered together,

First jumping the piles, then hefty bagged forever.

Never to live again, the leaves sure do shed,

Like cats who lick their fur and digest it, nothing’s ever said.

It’s harvest moon time, a bountiful reason,

All crops picked, and will spring again next growing season.

Summers gone and now is the time,

To fall into fall and truly unwind.

Now the trees are growing from green to barren,

No birthdays, no fanfare, the coming winter isn’t caring.

What on earth must the night stars think,

Watching winter spring from summer, then summer turn to fall,

Oh stars, you’ve never stopped sparkling, in the midst of it all.

A squirrel runs across,

Racing though the cut leaves,

Has nuts to retrieve.

Thank you for reading.

A Brand New Autumn was originally published in Soul Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

1.10 years from now what will you regret if you don’t learn it or do it now?

2. What are the three pieces of advice or wisdom you might offer someone younger and your story of origin for each that will illuminate your wisdom fingerprints?

• I grew up with fear; fear of other people, that they would think less of me; a deep fear that made me keep an air around me; like a facade; and it kept people from me and me from them. I think we ‘pretend’ (mostly to ourselves) that we know what’s going on to feign some sense of control over our lives but no one knows what’s going on; no-one has their shit together and how boring would that be if we did. We are all making it up and I think that’s right — we’re unlearning things that no longer define us and keeping what does.
• I remember the words being said to me on many occasions; you have to choose — it’s your family or your friends. I didn’t understand this but I assumed the right thing to choose was my family and because we moved a LOT I was left with little choice. I now realise that choosing our people — the people we have in our lives — is everything. The people in your life make your life rich and full and meaningful. We hold each other, catch each, get down in the trenches for the loves of our lives and this is a practice that must be learned and honed and continued because if we’re all in this alone, we’re all in that together.
• All we have is now. Nothing is guaranteed and it might sound like I’ve read the pages of some Zen Master and trying to implement that into my life, I have but that’s not the reason I know this. Last year one of my loves lost their son, he would have been 14 just three weeks after he died. From diagnosis to his death was just 12 weeks. The madness of that is something I can’t and won’t let sink into my cells and the abject horror of it, for them, remains ever present. So I KNOW that waking up is, in itself, a miracle and it must be revereed as such. We have a semblance of control of a few things in our lives but time, not a chance. Be. Here. Now.

3. How might you curate your relational life if you recognised that friendship is a practice?

4. How are you complicit in creating the conditions I say you don’t want in my life? (what are you not saying that you need to say? what are you pretending not to know?)

5. If the first half of your life was building a resume what would it mean to approach the second half of my life as if I was creating my eulogy — what would you want it to say?

It’s Never Too Late, to Have a Completely Different Life was originally published in Soul Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.