Cyclic Change and the Light to Come

Entry from the Artist’s Diary: October 2020 

“Summer quarantined in the NH woods focused my concentration inward with even greater intensity and made dearer my connection to nature. With limited human contact, nature became my world, my communication, my purification, my exchange of breath, my force of life, and it sustained me. But now it is late October and what was an endless symphony of birds and crickets, and a constant entourage of gracefully blooming flowers and wildly turning streams has vanished, leaving a void like the city streets we watched emptied by the arrival of the pandemic. It is a ghostly, hollow absence only the oaks fill, dropping their acorns like tears, one by one, from their giant heights onto the forest floor of glacial boulders below.  It is a warm percussion of wood against stone, in a rhythm whose ending will ultimately summon the Winter and a snow-white silence only hungry coyotes and the storm howl of north winds will break.

It took a string of three frost cold nights for the purple salvia to fade, and with that subtle color shift in their vibrancy; those few degrees that were suddenly slow to warm in the morning sun, the hummingbirds and butterflies were gone. Following one instinctive awareness, one call to move, to shift to survive, they departed. Some days my body still feels them, the joy they sparked in me, circling round the flowers and my presence as if I was integral to their dance and the geometry of their flight.  Some days I find myself still looking for them in the emptiness, retracing the template they carved upon the air, and hoping if my mind follows the lines of their migration far enough, we will find each other; that time and distance will bend to serve my desire and the veil of conditioned boundaries we accept as reality will dissolve in the truth of our infinite connectedness.

Yesterday in a moment’s glance, I thought I saw a monarch and my heart leapt to meet it thinking I had one more dance, one more chance to say goodbye.  But it was like when a loved one passes and even though you know they are gone from this life, you sometimes think you see them out of the corner of your eye, in the grocery or walking down the street, until that person turns and you are face to face with a stranger. As I turned to meet the butterfly, I realized it was a leaf floating golden down from the tree beside me, and that the trees too were letting go. We were all letting go together, clearing space, our minds and our limbs for the change whose waves were already upon us.

I was fine knowing nature stood through the threat of this virus with me, but who would be my companion now when even the trees shed their leaves and withdrew their life from the surface of Earth to sleep in their deepest, inaccessible roots? What would be left to cling too, but the Light?  I suppose that is it, that is the lesson in all of the challenges of this time…that without our outer distractions and entertainments, the touch of our friends and loved ones, we are left in widening measures of silent stillness to find the Light that will heal and strengthen, and awaken an experience of a greater human wholeness and potential. So let Winter approach, let the virus try to rise again, let the isolation blanket us where it will, but in it let no darkness or emptiness prevail, because we are discovering within ourselves a greater totality of being; a harmonizing truth that we no longer need to live by suffering, conflict and destruction. We are finding new dimensions of the self, dormant aspects of evolving mind, and waking our unlimited capacity as the new bearers of the Light to come.” -Deborah Goudreault