Autumn and I have a complicated relationship. I love her and she scares me.

I love spending time with her exuberance, honesty and courage. I love her bold, vibrant outfits and her slow 3-month strip tease. I love her unpredictability: that she is crisp and cool and rainy and sunny and dry and windy and unapologetically all the things.

And at the same time, her darkness encroaches. As beautiful and amazing as she is, she makes me look at uncomfortable inescapable truths. Like aging and endings and impermanence and death. She challenges me to face it all. Sometimes when I’m with her my heart hurts.

This morning I walked in the crisp, cold, green, golden, orange, purple autumn woods. As I breathed her in, I felt more than anything her aliveness even as I know she is dying.

Autumn and I feel intimately connected this year. The colors, the energy and the “mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age.”