In din of crowded streets, going among the years, the faces,

May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place

Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing the curlews,

Hearing the horizons endure.

- ted hughes, the horses -

There are few things that grip the pit of my stomach like the strike of bared branches against November blue, that hard-eyed crew-cut autumn blue that draws color out sharp and breaths out soft.

In those branches is the epitome of a season that for all its sweet is the most bitter, in which every leaf is tipping gold because it's on the downward turn - the season in which I remember that we're eternal.

Because you see this concept of time, it's something our bodies understand. Our bodies understand it because they belong to it, to the clay world transience. They move within its determinations and along its grooves with unflinching and inevitable obedience from first fertilized egg to last taken breath.

But our souls, they know better, and are never fully reconciled to this unnatural constraint. The sense of injustice, of loss, of poignancy in grasping at a full moment just as it's slipped away - the autumn ache -

it's the eternal within us arching its back against the temporal around us.

(and in that knowing, it becomes less of loss and more of hope.)