October Hinge

 I had a night of mixed sleep and woke up with the taste of the latest anxiety dream still in my mouth:  I needed to go to a different city to finish an internship for my spiritual direction certificate program, even though in my dream (and in waking life), I had the actual piece of paper with my certification.  As the dream ended and I woke up, I faced the rear view window, bidding farewell to DC in the sunset light, vowing to return.

I understand how my subconscious mixed the elements of waking life--I had been at a late afternoon Zoom session about changes to the internship requirement of my current MDiv program.

My brain has been thinking about various cities, especially in the light of Church History I class.  Every time we discuss an event in Carthage, I think "to Carthage then I came," and I marvel at how T. S. Eliot is woven into my brain.  Part of me wants to reread "The Waste Land" and part of me wants to read the part of St. Augustine that inspired T. S. Eliot, and part of me feels I have given enough headspace to male voices talking about cities.

This morning I read "End Times," an amazing poem by Dave Bonta, and I am grateful I haven't given up on all male voices.  He so perfectly describes what I've been trying to capture about these last moments in autumn, when some of the trees are still glorious in their color, but you can see the transformation coming.  Here's how it ends, and the poem earns this ending (as my old lit professors would say):

"i sit watching
the treetops glow

in sun that they can
no longer taste"

My thoughts turn, as they often do, to autumns past.  Having just returned from a trip to see my parents, I'm thinking of October of 1983, the first time I left to go back to my family home.  Early in the month, my mom appeared at my dorm room door, as planned, to pick me up and take me back to surprise my dad for his birthday.  At the end of the month, I went home again, and did a bit of shopping.  I bought a copy of U2's War, which I played non-stop as autumn shifted into winter, as the Soviet Union shifted and bombs exploded in Beirut and soon we would watch The Day After and think about apocalypses on a major scale.

When I look back on this autumn, how will I frame it?  Here are some possibilities:

--It was the first autumn in decades where I got to see the slow shift of the trees, as opposed to breezing in for a week-end.

--I was learning about parts of history that had eluded my previous learning, both in Church History I class and by the Timothy Snyder lectures on the making of modern Ukraine that he taught at Yale (so lucky to be getting them in close to real time).

--A different Russian/Soviet leader blusters about nuclear war, and once again, we're talking about a meeting place when the unthinkable happens.  I'm thinking about the scene early in The Day After, as Soviet forces amass on the border between the two Germanys and the Jason Robards character comforts his wife by saying "They might be crazy, but they're not that crazy." 

--I got back into a daily practice of sketching.  What did I sketch?  Autumnal trees, of course.

--I took lots of walks to drink in the autumnal loveliness.

--I thought about various mental states, how they can coexist in one brain.  I'm both happy to be here and missing other places, happy in my solitude and longing for loved ones.

--I am sure I will look back on this autumn as a hinge season, between the old me and the new me, between the world we are leaving behind and the one we're traveling toward.  But isn't every season such a hinge?