What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. ~T.S. Eliot
September: Summer ends, and we begin the push to the end of the year. Summer ends and work resumes in earnest.
September: the first thing I did was clean my desk.
The very act of sorting books, papers and projects has helped me choose what to place front and center of my attention and which to shelve for the time being. This simple act has given me focus, structure and deadlines.
September is full of promise and hope. So are a clean desk and the deadline of a year’s end just over the horizon. I’m feeling hopeful and focused to be back at my desk after a summer of grief.
This September: I’m adjusting to the memory of loving parents who are not longer alive. I’m peering through the murky fog of mourning and see hope and promise in the slow death of the garden as it gives up its bounty. I hear the crickets singing summer’s end and know the silence of winter is coming. I welcome the gradually shortening days as the earth tilts away from the extended daylight that makes summer so luxurious. And I welcome the shift that allows me to sit at my desk with focus and energy to blog, to teach, and to advance a novel that’s starting to sing in me.
September is like taking a breath: I inhale cool air of intention and exhale the warm air of summer’s ease.
September is a time to focus and write.
What does September mean to you?
Deborah Lee Luskin lives in southern Vermont and blogs at Living in Place. She is a freelance educator, a radio commentator, and an avid hiker. Learn more at www.deborahleeluskin.com.
Usually the hectic pace of life resumes. I teach part time. I home school my kiddo. And there’s an unspoken code in the home schooling world where you accept you often will be managing way more kids than you gave birth to.
But I spent the summer this year making major changes to my world so I could do all that and write and take care of myself. Time for the experiment to begin.
This is fantastic! Writing and self-care go hand-in-hand! Congratulations! Let me know how it goes .. .and do you have a plan for getting back when the inevitable interruptions of motherhood and living trip you?
I’m writing it all from scratch this year because of the momentous changes made this summer. I’m mostly pantsing it. LOL
September is a beautiful month and leaves begin to fall, and we start preparing for holidays that will be just around the corner. Many tasks to finish before the year is up!
September means a new season for me, the internal changes of moving from my trauma affected responses to choosing forward thinking. I pray my writing will move from less lament to more hope and healing.
I absolutely love your desk and view! It’s made me want to tidy mine and move it closer to the window, as mine faces a wall. Thank you
My desk is a mountain range of organised chaos. This post reminds me its time tidy it up once again.
Thank you. For us here September brings with it the promise of Spring but also Summer with heat and like your country the threat of bushfires with soaring temperatures. Still there is that same sense of new beginnings and I will do a Spring re arrangement of my writing life also. I love your desk and view. May this fall season bring rich creativity and achievement. Cheers!
“I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house,” ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
Thank you for the beauty of your words. September is the time when I say goodbye to students with whom I have bonded and begin a new life, or at least part two or three where words become students and teachers simultaneously.
“I inhale cool air of intention and exhale the warm air of summer’s ease.” I filled my lungs at this line. Lovely post, Deborah. Thanks :).
Debby,
Do we ever change, and when are we starting to be forever what we are….?!
Soon enough I believe, because your “September” is telling so much about who you are…. and your dreams, your passions, your “raison d’être “…. in a blink!
Still unscathed if not unscarred….
That’s patently a fatuous and foolish stance to believe in this lastingness, this immutability of our inner selves… or maybe not…
Then people leave us, pocketing some part of ourselves, letting us on our own to get attuned again….
Thanks for sharing this beautiful text, I will have a special thought today for B&B… as I often have some other days… maybe more often every September…
Love to all around you…
Jérôme
Hey! I write short fiction, please check out my blog and let me know your thoughts!
Cheers xx
I feel the same way about the new school year. I wrote about it in my post called ‘On the Cusp’