Autumn's arrival

Oct. 1, 2009

Dear Patty,

The coming of the fall is foggy in the morning, and a sheet no longer keeps us warm. Our dog Hank sometimes sleeps until midmorning now, slowly shaking his old bones and joints awake one more time. His sister Lucy is as ready as ever to descend the stairs and have breakfast. DC is more like Lucy, I am more like Hank.

But as the sun appears later and later each morning, the world and more of its people awaken together. But how to awaken?

In his poem "Being a Person," William Stafford begins:

Be a person here. Stand by the river, invoke

the owls. Invoke winter, then spring.

Let any season that wants to come here make its own

call. After that sound goes away, wait.

Waiting is not so easy. We're impatient, want to be doing something. Should be doing something. At stoplights we dream of going. At hypersonic computers we dream of the other things we could be doing. Clocks are calling our name.

When we were much younger the world did not time us, did not expect us, and we were happy just to be. Older is not necessarily wiser.

The waiting is rewarded.

A slow bubble rises through the earth

And begins to include sky, stars, all space,

Even the outracing, expanding thought.

Come back and hear the little sound again.

What is that sound? What made it? It belongs to no one and everyone. For me autumn's call is rust-colored, muted, autistic in the way that senses intermingle. The call is different for everyone, but the world is big enough for all the differences. Each of us and all of us are responsible for this creation.

Suddenly this dream you are having matches

everyone's dream, and the result is the world.

If a different call came there wouldn't be any

world, or you, or the river, or the owls calling.

It's how we live that means anything in this place and time we inhabit together. Being alive and being awake means taking the time to wait.

Stafford concludes:

How you stand here is important. How you

listen for the next things to happen. How you breathe.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.