The Time of Red Leaves

It was a morning. I woke up 40 minutes late and when we finally got into the car for school, the tire was flat. Noah's out of town until this afternoon, and as we were late, my friends had already made their drop-off runs, so we set off on foot. It was deeply foggy, as most mornings are here. I wish I had a really nice camera, so that I could capture the world closer to the way it actually appears to the eye. But I have my iphone and make do. The walk was really beautiful, despite the fact that the mist made it cold and wet and we were all under-dressed. The novelty of it all put the girls in high spirits. It really is a pretty little town.

This last one is of the sky when I was walking home and the fog was starting to clear. I was just beneath the liminal space where the heavens were shifting from gray to blue. A post on tumblr has me thinking of liminal spaces, lately. A transitional stage of a process, a boundary, a threshold. The tumblr post talked about highway rest stops as liminal spaces between this world and a fairyland, a place where the edges are rubbed thin. Where a person might shift from one world to the next. I think I am living in a liminal space. The world seems incredibly brilliant, but constantly shifting. A threshold is created in the tension between the tender beauty of autumn here, and my deep longing for  the startling beauty of Colorado, for my home. I am contemplating doing the thing I want to do more than anything else in the world, and entertaining this possibility has opened up another plane entirely. The veils have shifted, there is an enchanted island in the reachable distance. Standing in this threshold has bewitched my skin into an organ of mist so that I am easily pierced by sorrow and joy. They feel like the same thing. All my boundaries are thin and anything might enter and settle into my soft spaces. I'm sorry for being so abstract. A concrete way to explain it is this: an ancient couple walked by with their backs bent at identical angles like trees giving under the same constant wind and it was so beautiful it made me want to cry.