little mushrooms

Fall

What does Fall mean to you?
How does it make you feel?





Fall is many things, obvious things like carving pumpkins, leaves falling from trees, a certain cast of light that comes and goes quickly. Fall is about baking and putting up medicine and food for the winter. Fall is about friends and potlucks and saying goodbye to a good many things. Saying goodbye to all the windows open and to a low heating bill, it's about saying goodbye to the sunshine, about mourning the loss of long days.

Not to sound morose, but Fall is about decay. About death and rot and letting it all go back to the great beyond.

Doesn't it feel good to, after obsessing about the perfect tomatoes and basil all spring and summer, all the tending and the care, to just rip them out and toss them into the compost? Making way for the cold dark time? To prepare for quiet, invisible renewal? I love it. I love the power of the dark and the quiet. Don't get me wrong, I am so in love with spring it's not even funny, but fall offers the same kind of intensity that spring brings. Everything happens so quickly. In summer and winter you get there and then it just is. It's cold and dark or it's hot with long days. Spring and Fall you never know what you're gonna get.

The edginess of a season, that's what gets me going.

We went on a hike this weekend. A walk really. Two of us had a cold, so we meandered and took lots of photos.

Mostly on the hike (walk) I saw death everywhere. Salmon spawning, the last gasp of their lives to return home, many of them literally dead in the water.
The beauty of the decomposition, which I did not photograph, was a marvel; really amazing and really awful at the same time.
I stood with my daughter in silence as we witnessed the end of their lives.
We moved on and were both taken by the blackberries.

Our northwest abundance of blackberries is so taken for granted. These are amazing plants.

I realized that they were flowering and had fresh, new, green berries.

It seemed so sad, I wanted to say you waited too long, you don't have enough time, you should've started earlier. But I knew that this was just such a deep hopefulness that there was enough time for a second harvest. Only the blackberry is so good as to want to give so much all over again.

Really that's not true, but it's how I felt at the time.

I saw it again and again, the hanging on and hoping for something that would never come. Maybe it's just too human of me to be thinking about outcome all the time. Perhaps it's just the moving along, being in the now that the plants and animals were experiencing.

Perhaps I, too can be in the now and know that even if I'll never bring fill-in-the-blank to fruition doesn't mean I shouldn't move along toward being in the now with whatever it is that may or may not come together.

What do you want to bring to fruition in this darkening time of year?
What happens if it doesn't become what you thought it would?
Does it still have value, the reaching towards, the hopefulness?

I'd love to hear your thoughts...

I'm off to carve pumpkins.
xo

Loveliest Perfume

I wish you could smell this.








It's a deep, warm, glowy rosy amazing solid perfume.
The main notes are rose and chamomile with hints of old wood and forest moss.











Here is the amazing sterling silver compact the perfume was made in.

The scent is completely plant based.
The real thing, through and through.
We were sad to see it go.
xo