Snow geese, Dead Creek Wildlife Management Area, Vermont

About this time of year, friends begin to send photos of the changing leaves, New England views of autumn, walks on trails through the woods, and sunsets. Something about the crisp air, the changing season, that we know is at once breathtaking and short-lived here in the northeast, makes it poignant, fleeting, and we want to try to capture it somehow. We want to savor it.

Image by Laura Brines. Kayaking at Green River Resevoir

We just returned from a trip to Maine where we helped our youngest son and his wife with their new baby while they attended a wedding of dear friends. Driving through all the brilliant color, through Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, seemed such a miracle. Like a continuous rainbow of reds and yellows, oranges and umbers, against the evergreens and the blue sky. As one of our friends says, “It takes your breath away.”

Watercolor by Susan Abbott. Find her work at here.

My sister-in-law sent photos today of the view outside her office in Shelburne, Vermont of Lake Champlain and the Adirondack Mountains, and a flock of wild geese flying south. She accompanied the photos with Mary Oliver’s poem, “Wild Geese.” The poem is a call, an invitation, to find our place “in the family of things.” To find our place in cycles and alongside creatures, in blooming and in dying, in the seasons and in change, and as children, and parents, and grandparents.

Image by Deb Sherrer. Lake Champlain, Adirondack Mountains, wild geese.

We share these images and this poem as a fall interlude, a pause to breathe and smile, and be grateful for our families, our world, our work and the teachers and children with whom we share our lives.

Many blessings to each of you as we move from fall to winter and find our place in the family of things over and over.

Wild Geese

by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.