Making room

     We had a Nor'easter last week. I awoke at 4am to the sound of wind stampeding up from the fields like loose angry bulls, sometimes wrecking through the forest behind the house, sometimes slamming the house itself. Rain spattered across our metal roof. I lay in bed, a baby pillow pulled up to relieve pressure along my incision line of 28 staples, and listened to the outrage outside.
     We lost power for two-and-a-half days. At first it's quiet. The storm pulls away pretty suddenly, and there is no sound of a refrigerator humming, the furnace turning on, no radio or dishwasher. Just -- silence. It's a reminder of what living can be, at its truest core, what it sounds like when things stop and all that's left is the structure of the house over my husband, the dogs and me. 
     I learned something yesterday from the trees. I asked them about the violence of the storm. Most years we get these big blows in autumn that strip the leaves from the trees, or if it's early and the trees aren't ready yet, the wind shreds the leaves leaving parts hanging and parts in shards on the ground. I wanted to know about the energy of autumn. We call it "fall", and it has always seemed like a passive season to me. Words like "transition", "release", "yielding" describe what I've always thought of as the final stage in the loss of summer.

     But the trees told me something different. Fall is not about loss. Fall has power: "We don't yield our leaves; we push them off ". You can see it more clearly in the pines, firs and cedars: a layer of needles turns yellow while the ones closest to the light remain green. "We push off our needles and leaves to make room, to build capacity, to clean ourselves". Autumn is not about an ending or giving up. It is an active preparation for renewal.
     Wow. There is so much energy here: blazing trees, crashing storms, clearing out -- all to make room in the silent pause of winter for possibility to incubate. No longer will I perceive fall as meek. As I walk to the meadow's edge to greet the dawn this morning, knowing that storms are about to rampage through my own body to clear it of the cancer, I will ask for help from the trees. I may lose part of me. Will I be passive or active, release or push? What can happen in the silence after the storm?
     My favorite poem walks into my mind. I memorized it in high school.

I dwell in Possibility--
A fairer House than Prose--
More numerous of Windows--
Superior--for Doors—

Of Chambers as the Cedars--
Impregnable of Eye--
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky--

Of Visitors--the fairest--
For Occupation--This--
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise-- 

~ Emily Dickinson