Leaf-Fall & New Moon

Sap is leaving tree branchlets and sinking deep into earth, the November in-drawing to roots. Fallen leaves swirl in the wind and suss-suss along the ground.

Dark mornings have grown nippy. Not a time of sudden bursting out the door to savor Orion and the Pleiades fading, and first light. Many layers and prep, so only rosy cheeks are exposed to rosy cold dawn.

I've been down with pneumonia. Pulling out of it now, thanks to fine needle porcupine prickles, supine, in the adobe clinic of a Doctor of Oriental Medicine. That, and garlic elixir: http://feastandfamine.blogspot.com/2009/11/garlic-elderberry-for-oink-flu-blues.html

Had intended to help out at the food banks--but was not able to--so poor families could especially have food for their children on Thanksgiving, which is today. Am feeling oddly disembodied from seasonal must-involvements, including Handel's Messiah, dead ahead. 

Also disembodied from mad shopping, a worthy avoidance. I have a drawer-full of small treasures, tucked away whenever, for celebrations of friends known and not yet known through the year.

It may just be fever, disorienting me from usual pattern, or having left old Christmas pretties behind in Maine. 

It may also be endings of a particular era, with inchoate new beginnings--Golden parachutes for failed CEO's and cutting of social services in communities. Food stamps are being cut locally. The paper writes of a disabled woman relying on $200 a month for food, now cut to $45. She's likely to feed her cat first.

We're at dark of the moon this early morning, stars stunningly vivid in the Rockies. Tonight, new moon, a "super moon" close to the earth, and a solar eclipse. 

Tenting homeless last year brought an unexpected blessing of living by natural light--sunrise out and about, and sunset, day's end, crawling quiet into the tent, beneath the stars and phases of the moon.

Anyone who's worked in the helping professions can vouch for the pull of luna. Clients wig out and make emergency calls middle of the night. ER fluorescent-lit waiting rooms fill in hospital. 

The moon pulls on the seas of the earth and the ocean of waters within us. All of us on earth together in the midst of endings and beginnings. Leaf-fall, winter and spring.