Cosmic Debris

The leaves on the trees around the city of Chicago are ripening from their red and orange hue that you saw in the pictures from the previous post, and are amassing in piles around the ground and sidewalks. For the first time in my life, I am entering this season with less of my usual resentment at the weather turning colder and with more of a true appreciation for the cycle of life that we experience through nature.

I was talking with my brother's friend about walking around our streets during this time of the year, surrounded by the decaying leaves. "Death surrounds us," she said, "I step on the leaves and feel the dead energy." What she said caught my ear and sparked some thoughts. I told her about the pagan beliefs of the ancient Celts, who celebrated the feast of Samhain to mark the end of the harvest season. This is said to be a time in which the boundaries between the living and dead are blurred and made indistinct, when the fresh green life that abounded during the summer slows down and becomes dormant. For the past week, I've been musing upon this subject as I face the march of time and change in to winter. We turned our clocks back, giving me the great gift of an extra hour but also taking away a few more precious moments of sunlight at the end of the day. I feel myself gearing up to buckle down for the winter and get absorbed with work, books and films.

All the cooking I have been doing during the past few months as I have experimented in the kitchen have left me feeling the need to clear out my own body of a bunch of dead things. A majority of my girlfriends are vegetarians and have swept me up into their lifestyle of eating fresh fruits and vegetables. I have finally joined their bandwagon of trying to put mostly good things into my body after a prolonged season of very decadent living. I have learned that times of indulgence must be balanced by periods of austerity - and with this thought I began a mostly raw food fast last week and have been avoiding putting animal products into my body.

Kelly Hyatt called me up over the weekend to invite me to do yoga with her at a new yoga studio in our neighborhood. I had been hoping for the chance to get back into practicing yoga after skating and bicycling pretty hard in the past few months, so I jumped at the opportunity. In the past week, I've practiced yoga every day and have felt my body become more efficient and tuned as a result. Coupled with the vegan fast, I feel my organs, blood vessels, skin and body system adjusting to a healthier metabolism. I had been feeling the effects of getting older by noticing that I no longer bounce back from my skatepark wounds and bruises as quickly as I had in the past, with just a good night of sleep to heal me up. It has been taking me longer to physically recover from skateboarding and I had been feeling as though my energy was slowing down and becoming sluggish. There was once a time when I felt like a superhero, able to withstand an extreme athletic lifestyle, on fire about everything. I want to set my body up to get back into that kind of shape.

I've been told that the best times for fasting are during the shifts in the weather, to prepare one's body to enter or exit the dormancy of winter. I have found that this has been my own instinct, and now have a better understanding of why I have this impulse as it connects to larger patterns in life and in nature.

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I also wanted to remind us/myself of the upcoming Leonids meteor shower on November 17 and 18. We enjoyed the Perseid meteor shower on a few outstanding nights this past summer. A meteor storm is defined as 1000 meteors or more passing through the path of the earth. I had a great conversation during the meteor event in August about the shape of the moon changing perhaps by the pummeling that it takes from these clouds of cosmic debris.