october is the worst and i'm determined not to miss it.

on grief and beauty and noticing

a long time ago someone i knew died in october.

the next year it happened again, two-fold. another year a miscarriage on halloween, and i think it was after that i started armoring myself against the whole month, just to be safe.

i don’t know why i decided to scroll through the news before writing this morning, a reversal of a pretty rigid and long-standing rule; probably it had something to do with the wind shifting and the air getting clearer and the body remembering. (most years, my body reminds me before the calendar does. the ribs and organs contract, the breath shallows, the heart tries to hide from itself). but i caught myself mid-scroll this morning with an oh no you don’t, not this time and here we are.

because - have you noticed? - hiding from ourselves, from our grief, isn’t making us free.

deep breath in, and all the way out, so begins october. and this october, so begins a fierce and loving practice of noticing. more on this as the month inches along, but for now a memory that came back to me in a dream last night (and about which i have previously written on the pulse yoga collective blog). a memory of noticing.

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Last year I spent a few mornings in Kyoto, wandering through its labyrinthine alleyways. Two days in a row, I saw the same man in roughly the same place, near a small archway adorned with braided rope and folded white paper, marking the entrance to a shrine. Before he passed the archway, he turned to face it, bowed slowly, then paused another few seconds before continuing on his way. On the third day, I walked a little earlier, and saw the same man but at a different part of the alley. I saw his brisk pace slow as something on a doorstep seemed to catch his eye. He turned and paused a few seconds, in precisely the way he did before the shrine, and then continued on his way. When I reached the doorstep, I paused too and looked down to see a vibrant purple flower with an impossibly thin stem and three long leaves which had pushed its way through the concrete and was perfectly framed in a slant of morning sun.

Such a diminutive miracle made me laugh because it was the kind of thing that my attention would have caused some other traveler to pause and look at. (often when i’m walking, i’ll stop to look at something with such focus and delight that other passerby will follow my gaze, hoping to see something worth writing home about. almost always they seem disappointed by the intricate roof tile or climbing vine that has me rapt. probably we write home about different things). I was not disappointed. I smiled a genuine, full-faced smile. I didn’t even take a photo. I made in my heart a tiny, reverent bow.

I could have read in a guidebook that people in Japan often bow before passing a temple or a shrine. It would not have had the same effect as witnessing this man on his morning walks, who affirmed for me the importance of reverence and beauty, and that either (especially when framed in a slant of morning sun) is worth pausing to notice.

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when my heart feels unbearably heavy, or when the human experience feels weighted toward suffering and injustice, every little glimpse of beauty or love or kindness i can take in helps balance the scale. and so i double down on noticing.

the moment we’re in needs us to be here and human, needs us to hold the beauty and the ugliness of our humanity, and to hold it up to the light. and so i double down on noticing.

october rolls in and this time, i’m keeping my eyes open, my breath deep. …at least, i’m gonna try. thanks in advance for being my accountability buddy, through the ether.

sending love from here
💚//m