autumn clarity

When you ask a person to write something for you, it is a very intimate request. That's because when you ask someone to write, you are essentially asking them to shave away a layer of skin—of privacy—and expose a little bit of their innermost being for the world to see and judge.

I was a little hesitant to ask my boy Colin to write on nourishment. I had to be careful that the experience would not put us as odds in any way, that it indeed be nourishing—for both of us. I needn't have worried. He gladly accepted, and as I watched him typing his words out last night, I realized: this is the first bit of writing I will have read by him. This is nourishment in its most honest and real form: to share a part of yourself with someone you love, to make yourself vulnerable, to discover, to trust. To bring down your barriers and let someone in. Because in the peeling away, our bonds grow stronger. We become, in all irony, more richly layered through our experience. Col's eventual theme, then, of "shedding skin and growing new layers" seems quite fitting.

The changing time… the kids are back in school, it’s getting cold out, the landscape is shedding new colors, and the summer is officially over.

From summer into fall, it is my favorite time of year. The time of autumn, where there is so much change around us, in preparation for the coming winter. It’s where we find nostalgia in putting our sweater on for the first time since the previous season, where apples never tasted so sweet and savory, and where we feel that another year has just ended and a new one is beginning (even though it doesn’t officially happen until January).

My surroundings alert the involuntary sustenance all over again, and it makes what is a new year, come in the most positive and assured light.

It is here, I feel nourishment within me—a time of reflection and preparation—a time of shedding my skin and growing a new layer.

—Colin Alger