The sap from our oak trees is beginning to leave sticky traces on my car and the morning air holds a crisp, like the first bite of a good apple - a telltale sign that the season is turning. There’s something comforting about knowing that even nature is in anticipation, but not quite there. While we don’t get the fall leaves robustly here in LA, I know that the maples just around the corner will soon begin to turn as fall nestles in. For now, we sit in the in between, stickiness and all.
I wonder if it’s because she’s 8 (who else has just heard of adrenarche??), but this is the first school year I sense my older daughter thoughtfully wrestling with the transition out of summer; our nightly conversations are offering her language around giving ourselves grace in tension, to know it’s okay not to feel okay. You know the caterpillar to butterfly analogy as well as I do, but maybe we need to revisit a different version: to not speed through the middle because we all want the guarantee of what we become rather than the process of becoming. In their transitional state, caterpillars stop eating, bind themselves up tight, then hang upside down for a few weeks. Can you imagine the discomfort? Maybe our eyes settle here for awhile, observing the window between the now and not yet. One day just ahead we’ll fly, but in this season, we can let ourselves be when the world seems out of sorts.
To grace for ourselves,
Pat
