Wherever this finds you, I hope the season is unfolding gently. If it isn’t, at least you are in good company, and my hope is you will never feel alone. Make way for not so much a foray into decor inspiration as much as down to earth glimpses right where I am with fall feels in my home and heart.
Fall Feels In My Home & Heart
A New Cozy Mood Board
This is the simple cozy on my mind just now. Simple, clean candles are lit. Iced coffee–sometimes just black, sometimes with protein, and sometimes extra saucy. Delectable aromas in the air from deliciousness baking/ Comfy throws, and a plump pooch with caramel and creamy markings named Benji who wants only to curl up on his granny’s lap to shower her with affection.
The bonus is all of the items above can be secured quickly. The candle holders make a great gift, and aren’t there more than one smart stocking stuffers?
The last few months have brought more stress from a variety of directions than I can say. At a spiritual direction appointment yesterday, I was guided to see in fresh ways how WITHOUT QUESTION the deep longings arising from my heart and prayers are being answered.
The weight, ache, and despair I have been experiencing from assorted chaos erupting are not symptoms of a life off-kilter. They belong.
I simply do not like the design or manner in which the divine is responding (disguised as my life as always!).
Until yesterday, I had not really noticed the timing and clarity of the answers to my heart’s requests.
Were it my design–were I the architect thinking things through with my intellect or imagination, I doubt my prayers would be the same prayers.
However, I learned long ago that what God wants from me is a surrender of such thoughts.
When they are emptied and I fall into my heart (and not my emotions, btw…I am learning how much they are rooted in my physical body, not my spirit), wisdom and truth emerge.
Desire emerges.
Depth and love grow.
What I desire in my life right where I am is to live more fully into the fruits of the spirit (Galatians 5:22–23: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”)
Such prayerful desire is a high order! It’s not to be taken lightly.
This work sure aint for the weak or cowardly.
If I examine the desire to learn more Christ-like patience in particular, as I did in the session yesterday, I begin to see how much my impatience is now magnified.
It’s so humbling. More humiliations (subtle and not so subtle) than I can say have arrived every single day.
I consider the changes in the autumn landscape.
As days grow shorter and receive less sunlight, the trees get hormonal signals that winter is on the way.
I’m feeling the signals too, and I prefer to follow nature’s cues rather than hack them so I am drawn to cozier, warm, comforting textures and moods. Wind and gravity are having their way with leaves severed from their branches.
I am sensing signals from my own inner life to shed what no longer serves the hidden wholeness within. If this all sounds excessively ethereal or mystical, it IS. But for a mystic like me, energetic fields are as real and powerful as any of the physical matter you see reflected here in images of our home and garden.
A wise tree in autumn no longer wishes to waste its energy on leaves.
As an internal process begins again, I am reminded how patterns of death before transformation are critical laws that apply to creatures like me who are indeed part of nature (and not merely inhabiting it).
What is trying to transform? What must die, and am I resisting?
Even the resistance phase of transformation seems to be fruitful as I consider the chrysalis experience and also note cycles in me time after time!
Too often I find myself proclaiming “I have no answers” when the truth is, they are right here under my nose asking me to stay grounded and listen deeply.
In times like these, where “wilderness” feels like the most accurate description, I can feel beyond stuck.
Reverend Cameron Trimble writes “Many people look for certainty, but what they really need is attunement…Discernment is about noticing what life is asking from us right now.” She suggests wisdom may not come to us as a map or a concrete decision in the wilderness but as manna–just enough daily as we take the next step.
As I search my heart, this is indeed what the journey feels like just now. While my appetite for that map may grow fierce, I am called to a mature faith which accepts the gift of this manna with gratitude. With a mature faith, every single one of us can enter this season of Thanksgiving knowing YES, such daily manna keeps arriving and we only need eyes to see it clearly.
Peace to you right where you are.
-michele
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