Rug Shop Truth, photo & all text © Irene O’Garden, 2012
Identity redux, this week–
Bittersweetly turning season. Fall promise crisp as a bosom of starched cotton; melancholy on the shoulder like a swathe of tulle.
Children we first knew as eye-gleams in the faces of our friends, are now off to college in dorm-crammed cars. Other friends mend, ornament or discard their careers. Still others delicately extricate themselves from artful cozy nests they’ve woven over decades, carrying bright bits to smaller dwellings, leaving fluff and twigs behind.
“The hardest part of moving is getting over the idea of it,” says one friend. “So much of my identity has been wrapped up here.” Soon, I’ll shrug off an old kimono of identity myself.
Old wisdom surfaces with the ache and urge of incoming autumn: identify with exteriors–a job, a sports team, a house, even a relationship– and with every change, identity’s as slippery as taffeta.
But shifting seasons whisper true identity is changeless, interior, flesh to the fabric of change, not tailored but felt: the steady, ever-present watcher of change, whose costumes come and go and are to be experienced and appreciated and mourned and celebrated, but never confused with Self itself. The more we sense our deep identity, the more smoothly change folds into the wardrobe of experience.
How are things changing for you this season?