autumn solstice

another sept. 21st has come and gone and it's now as light as dark .. the light is diminishing. The beauty of the light diminishing is that we can rest our eyes. We can rest our eyes. And while our eyes are resting, we can look with different eyes perhaps and see more subtley. Perhaps we can see those things that lie hidden or lie in the recesses, in the shadows... I had a thought tonight at the dinner table. For some reason in the middle of the night I was caught by this image of the Aleuts scrubbing the gravestones of their deceased on the island to which they had been exiled during WWII. Members of their family had died while in exile and had been buried on a strange island and the family had returned years later to pay their respects to their dead. To do that, they had brought water and buckets of soapy water and scrub brushes and they carefully and tenderly scrubbed the headstones at the gravesites. The gesture speaks volumes about honoring the memory of our beloved dead. This struck me as very very lovely!! In our culture, the gesture i am aware of is the placing of plastic flowers at gravesites. Maybe because I value clean, I prefer the scrubbing gesture more. Anyway, i thought that maybe a way of honoring those things that have died in my life... dreams, friendships, people, false notions.. could benefit from my imagiining that gesture .. my scrubbing with water and soap and scrub brush those things that have died in my life. in the process I acknowledge that something has died and that while it was a part of my life, I honor it. This gesture, in effect, blesses that thing that has died and allows it to rest, freeing me to be alive to what is next.