October Blue

Spring is always my favorite time of year - so fresh, new and full of promise. Fall always seems like the end somehow. But sometimes endings are needed so you can start new.



Here in the Midwest, the sky turns this amazing color sometime in late September/early October. I call it "October Blue". (Opposite from the band, "Blue October"  - they are on the play list most days!) To me this color signals changes, endings, and in some ways hardship. Since it comes every year - but never on a set schedule - it reminds me that the wheel of the year changes at its own pace; whatever is present in my life in the moment is transient and subject to change. (The phrase - this too shall pass - comes to mind.) It reminds me to see the beauty in the everyday.

Sometimes hope is hardest to find in this season of change. It can be a moving target while the "lifeboat" tosses beneath you with fearful waves. It can be a butterfly that is always somehow just out of grasp. It is, as Emily, wrote "the thing with feathers". Both elusive and more buoyant than our fears. Hope is that which makes us human. It is fed by faith and strengthened by love. And - like much of beauty in nature - it is a fragile thing. It's also amazingly resilient.

Take-away - Try to look with fresh eyes. There is more beauty than you know. May you see hope in it.