We Are Grateful | 2022

I can smell the seasons changing with the slight hint of impending winter. There is a newfound crispness to the air, an elemental earthiness. It meshes and infuses itself with the wholly magical freshness of mountain air made purer by the cold. The wind blows and the Aspen trees shake their branches in effort to cleanse themselves of old growth – sending magnificent soft and crispy leaves in familiar shapes twirling in an ancient and cyclical dance, and clothing the welcoming ground in a manifold array of crimson, orange, and yellow hues. The exhausted land yawns and begins to settle into resolute quietness in only the wise way nature knows how. Wispy tendrils of wood smoke from chimneys will soon lazily curl to the sky in silent homage bringing a nostalgic fragrance of nature’s own incense. Time slows, even creeps, subtly unraveling like an infinite spool of thread encouraging us to mimic it with our own slowing and rest-hungry bodies. To observe nature is to be wise. The change of the seasons teaches us when it is timely to slough off which no longer serves us like Fall, retreat into hibernation for healing and grounding like Winter, be patiently and newly reborn like Spring, and to rejoice in full splendor radiating like the sun in Summer. Soon, fall will be over and winter will come in her ethereal grace bathing the land in frozen gifts from the heavens. Ice crystals will fall like trillions upon trillions of tiny shimmering diamonds coating the undulating ground in velvety, blinding white softness. From time to time, the snow will come heavily, muffling all sounds, and creating a thick gray opaqueness to the sky as it shelters the land in its own protective cocoon. I look forward to it as if I were a child again. It opens my eyes as well as my heart to the ever-evolving and ever-present beauty that endlessly surrounds us. There is no better wonder than nature and there is no better nature than the San Luis Valley. – Angela Haynie