Happy fall, everyone!
A tree sketch from a mid-morning forest hike with a friend.
I love this season. The chill in the air, cinnamon brooms in the grocery store, brittle leaf piles, and the multitude of festivals are just some of my many autumn joys. But this year it’s been different. I’m working on my M.F.A. thesis, an illustrated middle grade novel, which is tough to do when you’re fighting self-doubt and applying for full-time work. My hopes were high going into fall; I was going to finish my book and work a dream job, but both have yet to happen. This fall I’ve been worried and unsure of my direction. I’ve prayed for guidance and I’ve spent nights staring at my ceiling, overthinking my future. But through all my fears, I’ve been reading.
This September, I’ve revisited poems. Not just in the works of Mary Oliver, Ada Limón, and the Book of Psalms. No, I’ve taken time to sit down and write many poems.
In high school, I wrote journals and journals of poems, dreams, and observations. My writing teacher encouraged me to write a poem everyday, and I did. In undergrad, my Illustration professor assigned us a daily sketchbook, where we had to draw a picture every day. Both exercises I found were beneficial to my creative improvement. I generated story and art ideas from these forms of ritualistic documenting.
While I never stopped writing poems or drawing in my sketchbook, I did fall out of the daily routine somewhere. Earlier this month, fatigue from staring at the screen, poring through applications and scrolling through the pages and pages of my manuscript slapped me silly. I started taking breaks from the computer to go to my library and rent books from my “To Read” list, and I somehow ended up in the poetry section.
Poetry has been a place of solace for me since I first read Shel Silverstein as a seven year old. It’s my way of self-reflecting, of taking a step back from what I’m doing and just sitting with whatever I’m feeling or observing. In the middle of this month, after getting a haircut, I stopped in a tea shop and read my rented copy of Mary Oliver’s Red Bird. It was wonderful. I miss reading and writing poems.
So despite my uncertainties and failures of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, I’ll have poetry. My computer exhaustion has led me outside, to run and go on walks and ride my bike. It’s pushed me toward daily journaling and drawing, and I’m writing poems again. Here’s an autumn-inspired one I wrote earlier this month after driving home from visiting my grandparents in their upstate New York lake cottage.
Fields of Goldenrod
Waves of green ripple in crests of
yellow, golds in the late afternoon
glimmer like an adolescent’s eye,
like the first crisp cut of teeth
snapping through an Empire apple,
my mother’s favorite.
It is autumn when I see fields of
Solidago and can munch on rusty reds
and corn yellows,
can feel my hairs rippling so slightly,
catching in the afternoon’s wearing light in
gleams of gold.
It stretches and I swim with the perennials.