Of wings and weighs

As I sit, leaves are falling in shades of shining yellow—months of sunlight, held fast through winds, now falling to the ground. Making new space in the branches that makes their absence glow. Spaces opening up this day of efen-niht in Anglo-Saxon—even night, the equinox, where weighs and measures are said to balance in preparation for the winter months. The Scottish 16th c. poet David Lindsay wrote in a poem to St. Michael, whose day comes at this quarter turn close to equinox: “Saint Michael [arrives] with his wyngis and weyis.” A time to weigh what works, what doesn’t, and what is ready to wing.

Have you ever felt a color, felt it seeping into your skin, running alongside your bones? My eyes are drawn to the slanted light, the horizontal lengthening light that moves across the shinedying leaves and I feel raw and seen—the space around my heart also made more open, like the leaves released from the branch to know something of earth, to offer cover for the colder months to come. A feeling of faded sunlight, yellowing and slow, slanted and leaving long shadows. Shakespeare wrote of this type of feeling, “My way of life is fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf.” As I just returned from taking—and leaving—my son at college for the first time, I too feel a bit fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf, kin with the branches’ bright absence.

Soon after writing this, I turned to my commonplace book and found Rilke quotes writing back to me about trees, of spaces made in absence: “These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.”

Maybe that’s what we do when we let go—let the absence find shape in our heartscape, offering new room for the sublime and moving space between. A space that, like the trees, becomes ever more delicate and laced, moving to meet the season’s call for balance—echoing the way that love balances the distance when there is loss or growth, no matter how small or large. Leaves fall with gravity, and pull towards the heart. Rilke again:

How surely gravity’s law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world. 

birch fire…

It does feel like there is a space opened up inside of my heart as I said goodbye to my son, goodbye to a time of so many years where we lived alongside one another. An opening space that needs room to find what it will now be, that grows as my son and I grow into something different than what we were. Perhaps it’s a space where birds can now fly through in this season of migration, as another Rilke quote found me: “silently the birds fly through us. O, I, who wants to grow, I look outside myself, and the tree inside me grows.”

It is no longer equinox, and it’s been a few weeks since I first began to write this. And in the space of those weeks I was able to spend time with a group of women writers—one of those invitations that find you when you most need it. The experience made me think again about the spaces between what we expect or recognize, that allow us to grow. 

Socializing can so often feel porous for me, needing boundaries and limits to try and keep myself whole and not feel immediately spent. And yet in the company of those women, the space we created for one another, together, held us in a way that felt as if birds could fly through us. That while learning about one another, looking outside ourselves, the selves within us grew. To be at home among strangers, to find friendship so quickly and willingly arrive among us. It’s the type of experience that gives space to grow even more than you thought possible, needed, or desired. And then to leave such time with memory, experience, and pure joy—to know what it is to truly be in such good company.

One night during our time together the aurora alerts had been busy, and as soon as it was dark, we went outside, trying to discern any ghostly movement that differed from the broken cloud cover, surprised to find that our phone cameras could pick up hues of red and green where we could not yet make them out with our eyes. What else hovers just out of range of what we call sight, we wondered aloud together. 

Later that night, I headed out again after midnight. The clouds had moved off and the sky became flooded with a red light like I’d never seen before—closer to the phone images than what we had been able to see before, as if closing the distance between our eyes and the camera’s slow capture. As if to affirm from above what we knew below—that what we were experiencing, alone, together, was a quiet, effortless magic.

I keep thinking about the juxtaposition of these weeks—of endings and beginnings, letting go and letting in. Of floods of color above and around us that glow to make us notice. To feel the weight and wing of color, of sadness and joy at the same time—all a part of the damned fleetingness of life that we are told too often is rushing past us.

The color of the leaves, sere and yellow, letting me feel a new absence, yet pull memory and love toward the heart. The warmth of a red night sky mirroring the warmth and joy of company. All as if to say there is no such thing as an ending and beginning. The leaves will turn green again, the sky dark velvet black. And back again to bright, glowing ember. It would feel so less jarring, to think of everything as ebb and flow, rather than the discomfiting claims of beginnings and endings. 

I recently read that in medieval texts a color block of yellow would be washed over passages that were too sacred to reveal all at once. Color in this way had a profound meaning—it could transport the reader and the listener (as texts were read aloud, in community) to understand a type of silence, a quieting of the voice, a space for mystery. A yellow block on the page represented a visual moment to convey silence, a space of silence held within the text.

Page from Silos Apocalypse Manuscript, c. 100 (BL Add MS 11695). Public domain.

When I learned of this I felt as if the fields of yellow outside my windows as we returned to Alaska were also a space of silence within our lives as parents, as a family. A visual silence, knowing that sound would return—new routines would be made, new ways of understanding and relating to one another as adults would begin. Yellow, a color of absence, of change, of a gentle grief—having faith my son would be fine, but feeling far away and always, always anxious. Yellow is, after all, an anxious color. But just for a moment, those fields of yellow opened a space to hold what feels sacred, to be silent. A visual moment mixed with sorrow for missing what was, excitement for what’s to come—space to feel the weight and wing of my son leaving my branches to start a new life of his own making. 

As I later sat under the red night sky, the last evening of time spent with the joy of new companionship, I again felt like there was space opening up for what is sacred— fields of red as a visual moment of silence, mystery—mirroring the warmth of what community, with space for solitude and understanding, can feel like. The sky was echoing it all back to us, opening up space to question, wonder, and notice what is happening all around us, but that is too often missed.

Both fields of color saying something more about what it is to weigh and wing. To be weighted to earth, pull towards the heart, to be unafraid of the spaces made so that silent birds may fly through us. To let go and to stand still—so that you can meet what arrives to greet you.