Screen are pushed up.
Storms are pulled down.
Next I notice the day shutting down earlier and night crowding in.
Then the vine at the edge of the forest turns red.
On a drive over the Berkshire hills I see splotches of color in the Sugar Maples along the road.
A natural sadness settles in as the warmth of the Earth and growth of the summer ends.
Feeling like a faded flower becomes the norm.
I have a pile of bulbs on the kitchen deck in a bin.
I have not decided where they will be planted but a store display challenged me not to buy them and I lost the battle.
Planning for Spring seems almost indecent, like planning a rebirth amist the ripples of a funeral.
This period when it's not quite Summer anymore and not quite Fall. Before the splashes of color that paint our trees can brighten the mood of the meanest humbug while the year winds down....this is a difficult time.
Wanting to curl up under Polertec and sweat shirt with a cat on my knees and a laptop on, well, my lap and doze. My brain becomes slower, chilled.
Tasks become very difficult to do. These days I balance my body's chemistry, really trick it out of wanting to curl up and hibernate through the winter yet to come.
I've spent the last nine months in a visual birthing tank –
in an interesting although it turns out lackluster activity. I've been the primary designer of an interactive children's magazine (created the graphic design, written all the original editorial copy, rewrote all the story copy and submitted some of my own, and scripted the programming to enable the magazine to interact with its young readers) and then been brutally shut away from it's final first breaths...pushed out of the group and the design re purposed. Not quite a still birth but not quite an adoption either... or so it would seem. Can one be fired when funds do not change hands? Blood, sweat and tears.
Ah, the pleasantries of donation.
I've been notified verbally by those, shall we call them fiends for the sake of this announcement, that the magazine design is not my intellectual property, although, of course it is. I've been told that designing a magazine is not so difficult and an inept and unskilled person has taken on the task of designing the next issue. Has my nine month of labor been tossed to the wind? Or simply how it feels. Perhaps the magazine will be totally redesigned by the two who hadn't the time, or experience to organize and give visual and thoughtful life to the material at hand, as I did over the last nine months. Is this where loves' labor lost looms?
Depletion doesn't even come close to how it feels when something goes astray as this project has. Guiding a project into life along the way is like watching a young thing flourish. Ones commitment to the process is intense and passionate. One wonders at those who do not understand that sense of drive and life force which goes into the creation of a thing like a magazine. Hateful to be shut out at the 11th hour and very sad to never see the project into it's full bloom of life. It's like stomping on a thing which is just learning to breath, killing it. Hateful, ignorant people would do such a thing to another person and that person's creation. They're out there. And they righteously feel they have right to do this sort of death march, this slap down of your spirit.
Are lawyers the solution?
Friends say best to move on and they are correct. But the mourning for the thing created out of thin air and pieces of your soul is not a simple thing to leave behind. It is not properly buried. One doesn't know if it lives or has had its guts removed and it's limps amputated by the fiends who you once considered friends. In a daze between seasons, depleted and trying to step away from a train wreck. It's impossible to do unscathed.
So not quite fall, not quite summer....a time of change, a time of endings.
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