This morning I awoke to another day, with muted birdsong, and an orange sun rising over the trees at the end of the field across the street. My goal is to get up just before the sun and stand on the front porch or walk around for a few minutes to be present at sunrise. This is supposed to support a healthy circadian rhythm as well as give my eyes some much-needed red light therapy. My eye doctor said sunrise and sunset are good for reducing inflammation and bringing some healing to my dysfunctional dry eyes. (I don’t stare at the sun, I just face in its direction.)

It is cool this morning, and fairly quiet. The starlings left last week, I think. They were congregating all over the trees and lawn in front of the house one afternoon, making a racket, and then they were gone. They’re easy to notice because they’re so obnoxious, but other quieter birds have probably left as well and I’m not even aware of it yet. I haven’t seen a robin recently, but it seems too early for them to have left.

Since late August, it feels as if everything is waiting for Autumn to come. We’re still in that in-between place of what is now and what is not yet. I try not to be impatient for cool, crisp weather and the bright reds, yellows and oranges of leaves. The landscape seems to have faded into a yellow-green, and it’s dry. Not drought-dry, just dry. We haven’t had rain in a week and a half.

The Calendula and Bachelor’s Buttons are not putting out as many blooms, but the Asters and Dahlias are going strong and the Lavender Munstead/English Lavender bushes are blooming for the second time this season. This is the Lavender I love the most. It blooms in June, I cut it back after that, and then it blooms again till frost. I’ve been able to collect and dry many bunches, while still leaving plenty for the bees.

I walk around the garden, saying good morning to the plants, shaded by the row of White Pines in the backyard. I gather some parsley for my morning juice (currently celery, carrots, apples, ginger, lemon & parsley) and head back inside.

After a few minutes of yoga stretches and breakfast, I go outside with a basketful of new aromatherapy blends and crystals for my shop, plus my phone and a table for a product photo shoot. I collect a few flowers (yellow and gold Calendula, Feverfew, Lavender & Bachelor’s Buttons) from the garden as props to pretty up the photos and then spend an hour taking photos. This isn’t one of the favorite parts of my business. Editing I don’t mind, but the actual photography always makes my lower back hurt. I have to crouch or bend in an awkward way to take photos so an hour at a time is the max I’ll do. Right now I’m working through my product catalog, changing the background of things I keep in stock and taking photos of new products. I take photos, plus short videos of me holding each crystal so people know how big they are.

After a workout and a shower, I eat lunch and go upstairs for a nap. I don’t nap every day, but more often than not, I take a short nap and read for a while in the afternoon. On days that I’m tired and try to power through, I am so unproductive. I can’t think straight and make clumsy mistakes in whatever I’m working on.

This isn’t a day I can actually nap though, because the farmer who rents the field that surrounds us on three sides has sent what seems like every piece of machinery he owns through the field today. There’s more equipment out there again now. It looks like a disc harrow. Yesterday, a tractor with a spreader came through and it seemed he was dispersing pellets of some kind–fertilizer possibly? Then today, there was a plow, a seed spreader or maybe more fertilizer, a machine that sprayed something (hopefully water and not pesticide on a bare field), and then a couple of other machines that I lost track of.

So I work on a couple of Substack posts, and don’t finish either one. I start one about daily rhythms and another about a sense of place, in a similar vein to what I’m writing about here, and then drift off, uncertain how to wrap them up. I start a post about books I’m reading and then head over here to show up on this dear blog I’ve been neglecting for months!

When I think about this sleepy part of the world I live in, I have to laugh at how annoyed I get at all the farm machinery. Honestly, this is the most noise we ever hear up on this hill, during planting and harvesting. And it doesn’t last long. No construction noise, except occasionally in the distance, like a half mile or more away. Even the grain bin fan down at the end of our road is noisy only a few days a year. We have trucks and cars and school buses that go by, but nothing like on a main road. I live in Paradise compared to so many, and I acknowledge my privilege and am thoroughly grateful.

As that last piece of farm equipment chugs and whines away down the road, I listen and watch for the birds to come out of hiding and look for our herd of cats (six!) to come to the back door in demand of their dinner. The sound of crickets and the breeze tickling the leaves of the maple outside my window are all I can hear.

Tonight is the Harvest Full Moon. And the Equinox is only days away. As the Moon rises high over the fields and trees, I’ll give thanks for the many blessings in my life, and will offer a prayer for peace and wellbeing for all.