Penny Post #21: The Tide Will Turn

I’m connected to this rock & am floating in a sky that knows my name.

Living in Connecticut, seasons were apparent. Summer is bright and sticky. Autumn is colorful and dooming. Winter is bleak and snowy. Spring is new and I’m allergic to it. All in all, I knew the seasons. I knew roughly what time they would come and roughly what time they would pass on their duties to another.

Living in San Diego, seasons are not apparent. Summer is bright and warm. Autumn is bright and warm. Winter is slightly less bright and slightly less warm. Spring is bright and warm (allergies: TBD). All in all, seasons exist yet their differences rarely do.

Photo by zero take on Unsplash

Maybe it is in my Northeastern blood, but the changing of the seasons is bone-deep for me this year. I can feel it. Summer is slipping away and a slightly less summer-y summer is replacing it. Despite the nominal change, I can still feel it. I can feel it in the way my hair rises on my arms with a slight breeze. I can feel it in the way the sun blinds me mid-afternoon. I can feel it in the way our summer drought at work is ending and people no longer live on an endless cloud of summer, they are descending into the cloud instead. I can feel it in Zach Bryan’s lyrics. I can feel it in the rust of his voice. I can feel it in the slowness of fall, in the way things slow down to hold on to the remaining life. And I can’t explain it, but I know that I feel the shift in my bones.

I’m not one who balks at change. In fact, I demand it.

The versions of myself - what I term “eras” (thank you, Taylor) - extend far back. There are many versions of Kiera because the one constant in my life is change. Along the way, one version of Kiera decided to accept change for us all. And here I am - many iterations past that fateful version of self - still changing. Maybe because I’m a being who accepts the change of itself the Earth is more willing to let me feel the change of itself. We are bound together: to change.

So being able to feel the change in my bones is welcome. I feel simultaneously extremely small and extremely large. I’m both an insignificant porter of the Earth’s tilt and a special witness of it. Paradox.

Only the paradox comes anywhere near comprehending the fullness of life.

Thank you Carl Jung. I agree with you. If nothing else, aren’t the seasons a paradox? One Earth. More than one state of being. Two (or more) things can exist at once. Both, and.

We are now in the shadow of the summer. It has come and gone with many challenges and many, many memories of which I will seek to be close to in the future. We are in the coming of Autumn. But soon, too, it will go. And so too with Winter. So on and so forth.

The tide will turn. And so too will I.

See you at the next tide,

Kiera