Permission

Looking back on the past few months, there have been a lot of people reading my flaws back to me like something out of a murky puddle, or the hood of a Honda: skewed but close enough to the truth to be wearing my clothing or holding my tattered copy of something with notes in the margins. 

I'll be the first one to tell you that this has been a year for the books. But, as it finally comes to a close, I am making lists of all the pain that can close with it. As with any trying time, I am trying to give myself permission to let go. 

Lately, I've been wearing my daisy rain boots, proactively. Rather than being a proper winter, it's like Mother Nature is  mid-catharsis, unprepared to freeze or thaw until she has released whatever sorrow she has left. I think I've entered the freeze before she has and am awaiting snow, eagerly. Mother Nature has already given the green permission to die and the soil permission to grieve. And now we wait, in this blue winter, for something white. Something pure. To forgive the ground, and the people who have poured their soles all over it: permission to recuperate.  

That's the thing about the seasons and why I breathe the air waiting for it to smell like snow; it knows what comes next. While I rarely have a clue; the sun precedes the fall,  the leaves precede the snow, the snow precedes the wet...and the cycle continues. With any luck, humans can be capable of breaking their cycles. We can take only the best parts of the people who came before us, we can learn from our mistakes, we can bury our demons, our blame, our sadness, underneath the snow. 

And time will bring with it permission to begin again.