What Are You Rooting Into
The light changed first.
In summer I wake to a morning already underway. The sun is up before me, the day bright and asking. Now I wake to a softer light. It arrives lower and gentler, and I can look straight at the morning instead of squinting into it. In the evening the light slips away earlier than I expect, and I find myself reaching for a lamp before I’ve finished what I meant to do.
The air has cooled. I feel it on my arms when I step outside. I’ve started reaching for heavier clothes. A sweater in the morning. Socks. A blanket on the chair that stayed folded all summer. None of it feels like a burden. The weight feels closer to being held.
The leaves are turning and then letting go. Everything around me seems to be drawing in.
Summer is an outward season. Doors stay open. The days are long, loud, and full of other people. I spend those months facing the water, swimming, walking the cliffs, watching the horizon. There is a vibrancy in it I love. It also asks a great deal.
Fall asks less. Or it asks for something quieter.
I feel a calm this time of year that I don’t feel in July. My body slows without being told. My attention drops from the horizon to the ground in front of me. I want fewer conversations and longer ones. I want to cook things that take hours.
And I’ve noticed something I didn’t expect. In fall I feel closer to the earth than to the ocean.
For someone who lives near the sea and has shaped much of her life around it, that surprised me. The ocean has kept me company through more changes than I can count. I go to it when I need to remember who I am.
But lately I walk the dirt road to my cottage and feel the pull downward. Toward soil. Toward what holds.
Perhaps it’s because in summer I am reaching, and in fall I am rooting.
That feels right.
There is a quiet fact about trees I keep returning to. As the leaves fall, the tree sends its energy down. Roots grow through autumn while the soil is still warm, long after the branches have gone still. The part we can see is closing for the season. The part we can’t see is busy.
I recognize myself in that.
Fall is usually described as a season of letting go. I find myself more interested in what stays. What gets fed while nothing seems to be happening. What deepens in the dark so that, come spring, something rises.
This is a threshold.
I can feel it the way you feel a doorway in a dark house, by the change in the air. Behind me, the bright outward months. Ahead, winter and its long inward stretch. And here, this in-between, where most of the work happens underground.
I don’t want to rush through it. I want to let it slow me down.
So, this is the question I’m carrying into the coming weeks, and I’m offering it to you, too.
What are you rooting into?
For me, the answer is my body.
This fall I am paying closer attention to it. To what I eat, and how it sits with me. To how much I move, and whether I’ve given my muscles real work or only good intentions. To what my body needs that I have ignored in the past, while my attention was out on the horizon.
There is nothing dramatic in it. A meal chosen with care. A workout I show up for. A pause to notice what I feel before I talk myself past it.
Yours might be a place. A practice. A person. A truth about yourself you’ve been circling for a while. Something you chose, or something that chose you.
Whatever it is, it doesn’t need to be visible yet. Roots rarely are.
My poetry collection Between Root and Sky lives in that space between grounding and reaching. If this season has you turning inward, it might keep you company.
Find Between Root and Sky here
Cover Photo by Emma Henderson on Unsplash
