A line an acquaintance wrote recently sticks with me….. how the world feels increasingly artificial and the antidote is to chop wood. That Zen phrase — chop wood, carry water — certainly not written for late Vermont autumn, but yet… apt. Early mornings in the dark, I boil water for coffee, the wood floor chilly beneath my bare feet. Not painful, simply something to note. Flesh, wood, temperature. The cats, thinking otherwise, sleep in the stray ash beneath the woodstove.

As the country rushes towards yet another election, late autumn moves in conversely slowly, balmy and verging on warm. Barefoot, I stack wood on my back porch, gather the summer’s garden debris of emptied flower pots, my watering can. Nearing November, the sky is sooty with the remains of sunlight. I rake leaves over the garden, gather apples and bake a pie, write everyday, do billable hours. I think: paint a bedroom before Thanksgiving. In all of this, time races through from that pre-dawn coffee to the evenings I lie on couch, reading. One cat emerges from pre-winter hibernation to nestle against my hip.

The nights are cold. Walking under the full Hunter’s Moon, a friend asks why we always seem to walking beneath the shining moon. The moonlight is so brilliant my cupped hands hold moonbeams. The bare branches are shadows across my boots. At dinner, we’d talked about what’s real, what’s not, and the national trend to make up your own narrative, facts be damned. In the witchy, enchanting moonlight, the whole thing seems real: fact, lie, shadow, brilliance, health and disease, the near and faraway. The evolving story.

To be well again, what might that mean?

The flowering plum sprung from late snow… ~ Meena Alexander