Fall has really arrived when the outside tap has been turned off and there’s no more watering of the front garden or filling up of the fountain. (Not only the birds like to drink there, our outside cat does too!) The rain is going to start pretty soon and although our home is colourful already, we’re going to add some feature walls of colour. (I say “we” but Sarah is the painter and actually finds it a calming, Zen sort of practice.)

In the living room, we’ll add a wall of Egyptian Earth (a terra cotta flower pot sort of colour) to go with the other walls of Straw. While some may call this “decorating,” to us it means more about the creation of a healing space.

The colours will probably take us back to a trip we made to Taos, New Mexico in 2001. The first night there I said I couldn’t sleep because the colours were keeping me awake. Not in the room – it was white with Ansel Adams black and white photographs – but out and about in the landscape, the art galleries, the rainbow over the pueblo, the snack stands with chili pepper ristras and wreaths.

Vacation time is good for its combination of rest and new discoveries. Sarah and I used to rent a cottage on Lake Huron when we lived in Guelph. It would usually be in July and I’d spend some time on my own and we’d also spend time there together. We loved that little garden cottage where we sat at the kitchen table for most of the morning: reading, writing, drawing, imagining.

We didn’t intend to get anything “done” necessarily but things did evolve in an organic way as we took the time to stay still.

These days of prescribed rest at home are like cottage time. I’ve moved a chair to the corner of my bedroom where I’ll read and write in my journal. There’s a desk right beside it and a longer table for spreading out.

If you’re wondering what those bottles are on the shelves behind the chair, they’re Raven Essences. As I intuitively choose flower essences to make up combinations for others and for myself, this corner is an energy vortex!

Sometimes I’ll use the Raven Essences manual as a divination tool to see what the definitions of the intuited flower essences have to tell me. For my current healing time, Ginger Lily reminded me of “silence’s compelling power” with its musical expression of a “wordless love song.” (Sound is used in the creation of Raven Essences by Andrea Mathieson.)

Pink Hawthorn “protectively cloaks our vulnerability and gives us the space to heal and sense new creative possibilities.” The musical term: “wind-whispers.”

Tuberose “aligns the inner compass that helps us focus our future direction and actions.” The musical term: “overtones created on a violin string.”

As Andrea says: “The metaphors in the essence definitions are an integral part of their healing properties, offering us a way to intimately reconnect with Nature’s wisdom and healing energies.”

In one of the books I finished recently, Lynn Thomson writes: “Our everyday lives obscure a truth about existence – that at the heart of everything there lies a stillness and a light.”

The book, Birding with Yeats, has such a great title, I couldn’t resist reading it. “Birding with Jim” for instance wouldn’t have quite the same resonance. As it turns out, Lynn’s son is named Yeats for the Irish poet as well as for a friend of his father’s.

Mother and son find a way to be together through birding. As Lynn says: “I think the most important quality in a birdwatcher is a willingness to stand quietly and see what comes.”

I feel that way with these restful, cottage days. And not having to get up immediately in the morning is a bonus. There’s time to muse as I don’t have to scoot down to the dining room at “cancer camp” in time for breakfast. The projects all in their file folders and binders are not clambering for attention. It’s as David Whyte advises in “What to Remember When Waking”:

there is a small
opening
into the new day
which closes
the moment
you begin
your plans.

With cottage time there are no plans except putting the coffee on, making some breakfast, all in good time.

David Whyte writes while travelling and while at home on Whidbey Island. At the end of his poem he writes:

Now, looking through
the slanting light
of the morning
window toward
the mountain
presence
of everything
that can be,
what urgency
calls you to your
one love? What shape
waits in the seed
of you to grow
and spread
its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting
in the fertile sea?
In the trees
beyond the house?
In the life
you can imagine
for yourself?
In the open
and lovely
white page
on the waiting desk?