Thisness

I’m quite certain that I will never get tired of watching the leaves turn.  Come September, and probably late August, I begin to watch for changes: Ah yes, that green leaf definitely has shades of orange in it.

What’s funny is that every year, despite my obsession with looking for fall, I am always surprised to see that it’s more magnificent than I remembered from the year before.

This is my favorite time of year, but among the first dons of turtlenecks, the pumpkin pies, and apple cider, the birthdays of daughters, there are reminders every year around this time of sad things.  The last days of October the void that was created in 2008 when my Aunt died, feels vast.  For these days it is easy to be swallowed up by the suddenness of her death, and what we are all trying to pick up now that she is gone.

Harper’s birthday falls close to the same day I found out I was miscarrying in 2005, a week that I remember with sadness but also thankfulness in a lovely husband, a wonderful doctor, and that verse in Joshua 1:9 that was written on a building’s wall as we made our way to the hospital.

I don’t quite know why, but sadness and joy mixed together comfort me.  Despite the sadness a daughter sits with in losing her mother, there is still beauty in the home she has created, in the new job she seems to be created for, in a community she is well-known and celebrated in.

While I wonder about a baby that was supposed to be born on a summer day, I also celebrate the ones that were born in the fall.

And every year, those leaves change no matter what’s going on in the world.

In an essay called The Thisness of What Is, Diane Ackerman quotes Avram Davis in an explanation of “thisness:”

“There is only one God,” Hasidic teacher Avram Davis writes, “by which we mean the Oneness that subsumes all categories.  We might call this Oneness the ocean of reality and everything that swims in it (which abides by) the first teaching of the Ten Commandments, ‘there is only one zot, thisness.’ ‘Zot’ is a feminine word for ‘this.’ The word ‘zot’ is itself one of the names of God – the thisness of what is.”

The “thisness” is that each year I am refreshed and subdued by the change of season.  In my observation of sorrowful things and wonderful things I see that they’re all tangled up together, maybe even holding hands.

The lesson for me is not that everything works out.  The lesson is in the midst of something I don’t understand,

it’s good to sit and watch for the “thisness” in that moment.

Because it wows me every time.

**Want to read another post about this idea of holding hands with grief and joy?  Check out Emily Freeman’s Chatting at the Sky post.  I read this post a few month’s ago and it influenced what I wrote here. (While you’re there, check out her other posts, too.  I love her “art mingling with everyday moments” style.  I nod my head a lot while I read her words and think, “Me too!”)**