Emily Brisse

Today is just another day, and yet it is the ending of one year, full of the last brief hours before another one arrives, and with it, so much mystery. I've always liked days like this. The inherent reflection and looking forward, the purpose in the pauses. This year, though, I feel more desire to be  than scan, to see how fully I can embody this moment, and then the next, and then the next. To be quiet and still. To feel my heart beating, the liquid in my veins, the breath flooding into the tips of my fingers. To live, simply. We have a thin covering of snow on the ground this morning--pockets of brown earth poking through--and the sky is brilliantly blue. The air is crisp and icy. Branches hang bare. Deer tracks reveal night visitors. A train moves in the distance. In the distance, friends move into new jobs and new relationships and old patterns and ripe laughter. In the kitchen, my husband brews coffee. In the next bedroom, my nephew stirs. Inside my body, among my muscles an

Every year we have been witness to it: how the world descends into a rich mash, in order that it may resume. And therefore who would cry out to the petals on the ground to stay, knowing as we must, how the vivacity of  what was  is married to the vitality of  what will be? I don't say it's easy, but what else will do if the love one claims to have for the world be true? So let us go on, cheerfully enough, this and every crisping day, though the sun be swinging east, and the ponds be cold and black, and the sweets of the year be doomed. -- by Mary Oliver

Research papers in and graded, To Kill a Mockingbird spins on, bran muffins fresh from the oven, one more walk. Good days, brown and scented with the end of fall. The snow is coming, friends. Cocoa, a blanket on my belly, deep dark, and settling in:  ahead ahead ahead ahead ahead ahead ahead. Time for music.