Is it fall already?  A little glimpse of golden and amber trees in Cleveland this week, a little morning chill there.  Fall is my favorite season.  I miss it in the land of eternal summer.  Is there a company that will send you seasonal treats?  Like a box of red and yellow leaves, freshly fallen from towering trees, a snowball or two in the winter, tender lettuce shoots in the spring and beach sand in the summer.  

My dad passed away in the spring.  An entire season has come and gone now.  It hardly seems possible.  Somehow it feels disrespectful when time continues to move forward while we're grieving.  Shouldn't there be a pause button?  And yet the river of time flowing onward encourages me to also move on.

I was struck by another quote from Seven Thousand Ways to Listen this morning.  ​"I know there is no place to go with your grief other than to feel it and ride it like a raft until that rough sea brings you to a strange, familiar shore that is both where you have been and entirely new."  The changing of seasons is that - both something I have experienced and also something new.  As the calendar pages turn, I feel the raft gently bumping the shore.  My ears perk up, listening for something new, curious to find out what is beyond the rough seas.