The Fall of Me

The way the sun looked at me had changed.

Almost overnight, it seemed. She sunk below the mountains that were gray and golden all at once, mourning the summer that was already gone. The evenings brought glorious freedom and light like I had never seen before. The mornings were cold, but the fog hung over the fields as I drove to school and I found myself wanting to eat it, to somehow capture it in a way that would sink into my consciousness and never let me forget its beauty.

I have been here before, I thought to myself, walking on the road.

These moments seemed to catch me again and again, the moments that seemed to whisper that not was all as it was, that there was another place that called to me from beyond the borders of what I knew was real. That reality was not at all what we thought it was. That if only I could open my eyes, really open my eyes, then I could really see the truth.

The more I thought about these moments of mystery, the more I felt the unknown places calling me, I wanted to go there. I sometimes didn't know how, but I wanted to go there--so desperately. More than I wanted to breathe, for to know the unknown is what I longed for as the epitome of my life, what I was made for. What I longed for amidst the mundane, scholastic, dull, intellectual moments of my life. It was what I wanted before money, before love, before fame. My heart beat with it.

And I think that's why people around here in these parts love the Oregon fall... it makes them realize that they, too, will fade in the end, but that in that dying, in that beautiful moment when the seed hits the ground and breaks open on the dirt, that something else more beautiful will emerge. They know when they see the browning of the earth and feel the chill that there are wilder things than summer to be had for man. There are lands to be discovered, mountains to be climbed, oceans to cross, rivers to ford, and lands to explore. There is more to live for for us than just this in and out, in and out breathing that we lose ourselves in as we go to work, come home, play with our phones, take the dog for a walk, kiss our lovers, kiss our kids, go to bed, forget to look up, forget to know that we were made to run free...

It's not just the Fall I love. It's that it brings to my mind the fall of me. The fact that I am mortal. The fact that I am neither robot nor heavenly being, but flesh and blood and bones that can hurt and bleed and cry. The fact that I only have so much breath to live, but there is one who lives in me that roars with passion and life and I do not have to live a boring life... in fact, I am called out of that and into the Light.

Oh, you precious dreamers, don't give up. Without dreams, we will lose the bliss of romance and the love of the wild places, and that must never happen. It is our lifeblood. It is our purpose.