The feeling of the change of seasons from summer into fall feels like it should be a sad memory—for whatever reason, that nip in the air and the sudden dark after 6:30 connects directly with my gut and turns my head—makes me stop—as if I’m remembering something with nostalgia. It’s not that fall reminds me of anything in particular...it stirs up generic kind of fallen-leaves-warm-fire-frost-on-grass-in-mornings kinds of pictures in my head...it’s not that my head or heart are remembering something that happened to me.
It occurred to me today that it may be that my body is remembering something… something cyclical, like the feeling you get on a particularly fast ferris wheel at the bottom, where all your weight drops down, just before the momentum carries you up again. Being in the Northeast (the home of "real weather", I've decided) has been funny that way, to experience my body reconnecting with the change of seasons. Maybe that’s part of what was so hard about LA, and why I lost patience so fast: it felt like one extended, dirty summer, one long season stretched out for 3 ½ years. Now, here, my body remembers what it’s like to be reminded—by the air, by the light—that we are in perpetual motion. But not a straight line with a single point of origin and one inevitable destination; a circle. Literally a circle, as we orbit the sun, but also a circle in time, as we return to this place in the seasons over and over again. It’s my body remembering the passage of time that feels like nostalgia. Reminding me that the skin that touches this newly-crisp air is older this time.
It occurred to me today that it may be that my body is remembering something… something cyclical, like the feeling you get on a particularly fast ferris wheel at the bottom, where all your weight drops down, just before the momentum carries you up again. Being in the Northeast (the home of "real weather", I've decided) has been funny that way, to experience my body reconnecting with the change of seasons. Maybe that’s part of what was so hard about LA, and why I lost patience so fast: it felt like one extended, dirty summer, one long season stretched out for 3 ½ years. Now, here, my body remembers what it’s like to be reminded—by the air, by the light—that we are in perpetual motion. But not a straight line with a single point of origin and one inevitable destination; a circle. Literally a circle, as we orbit the sun, but also a circle in time, as we return to this place in the seasons over and over again. It’s my body remembering the passage of time that feels like nostalgia. Reminding me that the skin that touches this newly-crisp air is older this time.
2 comments:
"it felt like one extended, dirty summer, one long season stretched out for 3 ½ years".
Ugh. YES! Tank tops and shorts for Christmas attire is just WRONG.
I love this so much. So incredibly true - we need cycles to breathe, and grieve, and celebrate, and it's hard to do that when we don't see that change reflected outside of us.
Brilliant.
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