What is this season.

Is it the fire and smoke season. Or that time of turning, reminiscent of my childhood with crimson leaves and pomegranates. Is it Friday night football games and homecomings. Or an early surprise snowfall just to remind us that everything is fragile, everything is out of our control. Maybe it’s the season of spiders, chasing the shadow of the sun before its angle becomes too low and lean, building their homes in my stairwell and the dark corners of the house, fattening up on moths and ants and waiting for the cold to snap, the frost to arrive, the darker solstice to come.

It is definitely the season of thoughts and prayers. But that’s a year-round thing now.

Cutting through it all is loss. The season of loss. Deep loss and grief, absence, emptiness. He was here and now he’s not. Or a fleeting loss, of wishing something would last longer, lamenting and willing the thing to stretch out its existence, freeze time. Maybe like a cup of tea or the beat of a song or laughing with a friend or holding someone’s hand. Touch. It’s not a flattening the curve kind of loss. It’s one of body cameras and dashboard cameras and iphone cameras and being seen and surveilled so much but never being more in danger and invisible. If someone was never safe to begin with, is their loss compounding, like those integers that are exponential and quickly fill and overflow a room, a house, a city, a country?

Maybe it’s the season of hypocrisy. That moral certitude that they have and I have and through some form of gaslighting, I wonder if I’m on the wrong side of history. How can love be on the wrong side of history. How can heartbreak and a heart broken be headed in the wrong direction, on the wrong path. Who gets to decide that path is better than any other. What do the intuitive and sensitive and artists and poets and caretakers and nurses and teachers and grandmas and those that work the land see. What do I see that others miss.

It most definitely is the season of insecurity. Food insecure, climate insecure, emotionally insecure. Behind the thing is a loss of self, or maybe even that the self never existed, a worry about not being good enough, of your place in line, on the treadmill of capitalistic progress of being left behind and left out and the scrap given to someone else who perhaps is not deserving either because of the melanin in their skin or who they love or their mobility or the money in their bank account or the language that they speak or their zip code, because that’s the diet and narrative we are fed steadily from birth. Go. go. go. Until you cannot go. Then you’re done. We’re done.

Perhaps it’s the season of rage. We seethe in disbelief that another and another and another person is taken, stolen, vanished, disappeared. We know the perpetrator – the virus – better than we know the victim. Because there are victims after victims. Bodies with stories, stories without bodies.

Who tracks them. Who holds these records, these breaths, sacred breaths, in the palm of our hand, cradling them up to the sky, offering them up in a prayer if you can call it that. Maybe just a whisper. Maybe just a shout.

What is this season.