5 Things We Learned this Fall (2023)
Before we say hello to winter, let’s pause a moment to say a hearty goodbye to fall - to back-to-school days, long daylight, pumpkin patches and the hallelujahs of yellow, orange and red leaves.
Before deciduous leaves break free from the branch and take to the wind, there are color changes and abscission processes to undergo - the closing down and cutting off of sugar-making, water-traveling, light-gathering veins in leaves. While we see the beauty of it, it is a dying process. The kind of dying that makes room for new life.
What We Learned this Fall is that kind of post.
Here are a few things I learned this autumn that you just might enjoy, use, or run with in your own way.
Laugh about your scarcity mindset, and then re-enchant it.
I know God is abundant and generous and yet I still find myself falling into ideas of there never being enough to go around, whether it is time, energy, resources, ideas, mercy or me.
Two of my Boy Wonders are helping me laugh about it and let God reshape my imagination. Recently when we were on the phone together having one of those high-interrupted phone calls I remember well from my own days mothering littles, my Kate yelled to her boys who had begin fighting over fall leaves in the yard.
“You guys, there’s enough leaves for everybody!”
it was silent a moment and we both burst out laughing. How could there not be enough leaves for everyone?
2. Being a nomad taught me the truth of being home.
Back in July, we sold our house of 18 years in a whirlwind weekend. It was a long-time plan, but it happened quickly. And our new house was far from being complete.
So we stayed at a cabin in the woods punctuated by many trips across the mountains, visiting my parents, visiting Mike’s mama, going to a wedding in Colorado, staying with our youngest daughter to help out with her new baby, staying with our son to watch his cats while he was away. It was months of back and forth across the mountains on the road and in the air, never sure for the first few moments of everyday where I was, where the bathroom was, on which side of the bed to reach for my ringing alarm.
It was not lost on me that I was hardly homeless. Still, I named the season with words like nimble and nomadic, things I was learning to be with grace and nuance.
Then, somewhere about 90 days into Ordinary Time, I read Psalm 90, and in a single moment I both learned something new and remembered something old.
God, it seems you’ve always been our home forever, long before the mountains were born.
Psalm 90:1
3. The surprising thing to do when you hurt from holding on too tightly.
While we were in a cabin in the woods, I decided to change up my morning walk by riding a bicycle on the piney trails. But after only a few days of riding my hands hurt. Not my thighs or my calves. My palms.
That got me thinking and thinking again and trying something new.
I wrote all about it over on the Companioning Center blog, “When You Hurt from Holding on too Tightly”.
4. Writing prompts are thrilling, scary, and necessary.
As if November isn’t full enough or long enough, I accepted a gorgeous 30-day writing challenge from writer Lori Brown Harris called #goodnessgrounded.
There were so many reasons not to do it - we were celebrating three birthdays and Thanksgiving, the flurry of final decisions before the house was done, I was juggling working in the middle of moving, the transmission went wonky on Mike’s car.
But it was calling - this writer, the writing, these particular prompts, this community.
I wanted to do every prompt in long form with plenty of thought and craft. Instead, I made room for all the ways it rolled out - on the blog, off the cuff, hidden in my journal, on Instagram, doubling up by joining two into one, contemplating the prompt for another time, and even skipping days altogether.
I felt alive, humming, rooted, growing. I shook off cobwebs and insecurities. I shied away and I took risks. I needed it, all of it.
Sometimes, our adventures brook no reason, only desire.
Here are a few of my responses to the prompts, Things I’m Trying to Accept, Say the Quiet Part Out Loud, Art as a Portal to Seeing God. You can find many more at on @loribrownharris1 or searching #goodnessgrounded on Instagram.
5. A new way to tuck in my day that expands my mind, heart and vocabulary.
I have always read at bedtime.
But the day I heard writer Ray Bradbury suggest that 1000 days of bedtime reading with 1 poem and 1 essay and 1 short story would change you and your writing, I changed the stack by my bed.
I seem to find nooks and crannies for poetry throughout my day (usually in the morning), but then rarely got to the short stories and essays. Now they have a place in my day. And I can still choose to read a novel or other long-form book afterwards or instead.
In the few short weeks since I began this new way to tuck in the day, I have been dreaming of peaches in Fredericksburg (Naomi Shiyab Nye), hairdressers who smoke and flick their ashes into towel heaps (Eudora Welty) and the tender next minute. (Brian Doyle).
If you need a new bedtime routine, here’s my stack to get you started. I pulled these off my shelves. You likely have something lying around that you’ve been meaning to get to.
Whatever you learned this fall, I hope you don’t just tuck it away and forget it. Instead, let’s pull them out, look them over and use them in everyday life. That’s what this reflection helps me do, make actual use of my lessons. And when we share them, maybe we can all get the perks of growth and attentiveness in being alive.
I already have a heading on a page in my journal, “What We Learned this Winter”. It is blank for now, but I will compile them for you at the end of February.