When the cold air comes.

a poem, maybe a prayer, but mostly a reminder

The way I breathe cedar more deeply when the cold air comes,
as though it is somehow a more divine and precious
thing before a damp stretch of grey and mossy longing.

The way the oak never forgets to skip its seedless year
and does so gladly, knowing we will survive without its acorns,
knowing it is not responsible for our survival.

The way the arbutus sheds its rich crimson sheets 
with so much eagerness and joy to be rid of them
faith filled and bursting that it is time to become sweetly new.

A holy ancestral prayer honored with one ordinary exhale
meant to reach our bones and shake us, too, bare 
that the light might make its way through us fully at last.

And all this without a single thought of who might be disappointed
by their changing, their turning inward to tenderly care for themselves
as though time is not at all a thing that can be wasted in rest.