Tell the Truth About the Season

What does it mean to honor the season we’re actually in, rather than the one we expected? Or the one we’re desperately trying to get to?

Here on the North Coast of California, autumn has been reluctant to arrive in its familiar wet garments. But today a rain cloud is at the door, promising to nourish the tree roots and finally woo mushrooms up from the soil.

Part of honoring the season is simply noticing what’s at our door.

What if we stopped trying to skip over the hour?

A poem about telling the truth of the season, both in the living world and in our collective cultural moment. About attending to what’s dying, what’s unraveling, and what might be quietly germinating beneath the surface.

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I. You can try to live summer in the winter
Or morning at midnight under the full moon

but eventually, the season is revealed.

It’s Fall.

The world takes a deeper breath and a sacred pause.

It’s raining yellow laurel leaves
and brown needles in the redwoods—

they’ve slipped on their autumn coats overnight
dropping yesterday to the ground like an old story
that no longer makes sense.

They know when to let go
offering the best of their beauty

as gifts to the land and the next season
each leaf an invitation
to follow our own turning.

II. We will harvest the things

that can be harvested

But we know the things that must fall must fall
for new ground to be prepared

with the composted remains
of inherited stories that no longer serve.

It’s Fall.

The world takes a deeper breath and a sacred pause.

Can we finally tell the truth about the season?

III. In the midst of the big race,

the world takes a deeper breath
and a sacred pause

while the leaves of Empire
fall out of our hair.

You know of which Empire I speak—

the one whose summer’s shoulders
brought great gifts:

all bright, all fast and furious
juicy and sexy and convenient.

Vibrant and violent and more—
It always brought more.

Whether the more was what we needed or not.

But it promised too much
and took too much.

Now the Great Descent has commenced,
the Great Unraveling is here.

There will be a buttoning up
a shrinking of the afternoon

a difficult and stunning shedding
as a radical reckoning arrives—

It’s a moment to tell the truth about.

IV. Perhaps we fear winter

because we don’t yet see
what new spring awaits.

Yet when press our ears to the ground
of our being

we hear seeds of new dreams
already planted

in the soil of our pulsing hearts.
Seeds planted in Deep Time.

We know there’s no way to a new spring story
but through the lengthening dark
and chill wet unknowing.

Let’s tell the truth: Fall is here

The world takes a deeper breath
and a sacred pause.

It’s a moment to tell the truth about.

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“Tell the Truth About the Season” appears in my poetry collection Becoming Beautiful Barbarians. Its invitation to honor the season we’re actually living through also runs through Within the Cave Something Pulses, a chthonic poetic journey through autumn’s descent, labyrinth wisdom, and a tending the dreamfires that emerge in the fruitful darkness.

Becoming Beautiful Barbarians names the collective unraveling and descent, Within the Cave Something Pulses explores the intimate, seasonal practice of inhabiting it.

The themes in these collecitons are among the living roots of the upcoming Within the Cave Something Pulses, named after the book, an intimate six-week winter circle I’m offering again beginning December 6.

Together we’ll apprentice to the fruitful dark, tend shadows and dreams, and listen for what quietly pulses beneath the surface.