Even as autumn settles on us, hearty flowers remain, beautiful and cheering. Besides this wonderful patch, I see a very abundant rose garden, hearty old fashioned roses -- some manage to last until Thanksgiving. These flowers can easily be a metaphor for those of us who are in an autumn of life. I see many hearty, active people older than I and I enjoy being in there company.

I have a correspondent who writes that she knows she should walk walk, should lose weight, but inertia has trapped her. Inertia is our enemy. The older we get, the more we have to truly fight inertia, the mutters that the weather is not good enough to go for a walk, the thought,why not have another cookie? It is difficult for those of us with a high threshold for pain to empathize with those who are bothered by every twinge -- we just ignore those twinges. Inertia really is the enemy. The older we become the more we must care, the oftener we have to chant the mantra, "Use it or lose it." That grows truer and truer as the years add up. I don't advocate taking up marathon running in ones 60s; but taking up one of the gentler forms of yoga -- yes! or tai chi -- both exercise the mind as they exercise the body. And about the mind we REALLY mus remember "use it or lose it". I think about these things very, very often. I plan to keep on walking beside the ocean as the weather gets colder -- I have warm clothing. I have ended up near to the ocean at this point in my life and continue to want to know it in all seasons, all temperaments. It was very different today than yesterday, like a person with a touch of the manic/depressive in his personality, calm and lapping yesterday,roiled and slapping today. My legs tell me they are glad I'm using them. My eyes and ears are still full of today's Ocean Voice.

Harvest Moon

Perhaps this is a harvest moon; perhaps the harvest moon is the next full moon four weeks from now. Whichever -- this was two nights ago when the sky was clear and it was lovely. I am cursed with an electric pole and a swag of lines in my view. I wish the town had been fore-sightful and buried them like bigger cities do. Ah, well.

I am infected with autumn and there are, so far, only a few trees turning color. During the week I wrote a 12 page short story called "Equinox" in which I gave myself permission go linger on descriptions of autumn at a lakeside summer-people area. This was, of course, a metaphor for the only character, a woman who was in the autumn of life deciding what to do with her immediate future. It was not autobiographical except that all the detail of place were known to me although I've never lived at a lakeside cabin. It included past travels and I indulged in those desciptions too.

I am stunned that in the writing seminar I am taking no one is writing imaginative material. It's all memoir, confessional, possibly therapeutic and without any critical response either offered or, it seems, wanted. It's all pat-on-the-back time. I'm sure encouragement toward confession is good for people who have led somewhat repressed lives. But it seems to me anyone can profit from learning skills that allowed them to write more vividly and to think more deeply -- maybe even to exercise imagination. Apparently not. Alas. I'm accustomed to trekking up the writing mountains alone. I had hoped for one helpful person -- there is one woman who has worked at various writing-type jobs an who read a well crafted personal memoir first chapter ... perhaps she will be a bit helpful.

Ssasonal Change

The season is changing -- nothing new, happens every four months or so. Those of us who have always lived in the temperate zones are attuned, probably in more ways than we are consciously aware, to changes of light, temperature and nature around us. As the days grow shorter and the darkness longer, as we have many days of gray skies, chilly winds, leaves skittering underfoot, dampness not yet turning to snow, something a little like bearish hibernation seems welcome, even immanent.

This came to mind as I was drinking coffee a short while ago and thinking how very nice had been a long night's sleep. After a couple of restless nights, last night I went to bed a bit early, fell asleep quickly and awoke about eight hours later feeling satisfied as I listened to the voice on the clock radio that began saying it would rain all day and maybe all day tomorrow. I wish that weren't so but it's also okay. I have many indoor things I want to do. And then music began to play. I did not have to hurry out of bed for any reason so lay listening to music until something in my body said, "ready!" And I got up. I realize that for large, large numbers of people even those ten minutes or so are a luxury they rarely enjoy. They have work, expectations, necessities to tend to and have to get up and get busy.

I thought of Jame Smiley's big book The Greenlanders, well researched and enjoyable although it's not one of her most successful. I believe she was writing of how people actually lived a thousand years ago in a horribly harsh climate when she described those settlers who had very little food or fuelgot through the winter by essentially hibernating. They took to their beds for the majority of those almost endlessly dark arctic nights. So many images from that book, read many years ago, have stayed with me. I think many of us can feel that rhythmic instinct with the seasons that our distant ancestors going back to before civilization must have responded to.