THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS

Daylight Fading

Autumn is a smell: woodsmoke, decaying leaves and cinnamon. It’s a color palette too: oranges, reds and browns. The color of the earth on fire. The air has an entirely different quality with a crisp snap in your nose and the way the low light glows now rather than shimmers, the sun never getting so very high. The tastes are no longer the green bite of spring shoots, or the sugary sweetness of summer corn, but the savory, earthy, more subtle flavors of mushrooms, root vegetables and gourds.

Daylight fading
Come and waste another year
All the anger and the eloquence are bleeding into fear
Moonlight creeping around the corners of our lawn
When we see the early signs that daylight’s fading
We leave just before it’s gone
— Counting Crows

When we were in school, it was the start of a new year. A change in temperament as much as temperature. But as life has become more fragile, and fraught with danger, it doesn’t seem as lighthearted with the promise of pumpkins and pilgrims, Charlie Brown and of large family meals.

We seem to be in the midst of a major shift, and it’s unclear when it started, where we are in the cycle, and when it will end. Are we at the…