Found this at work today.

All I want is enough employment to keep me fed and healthy, and five jolly friends to help me cushion the sharp points. 
Sigh.

For one thing:

you just don’t know what you might see on the top of the parking lot retaining wall,
behind Victor Allen’s next to Kentucky Fried Chicken.
I repeat, you just don’t know.

For another thing:

even though field mice and squirrels and chipmunks and cotton-tails are prey and as such lack time to devote

musing on passing wonders such as moments above grade,
being busy avoiding those who would make them
the “food” in “food chain;”

maybe just
maybe they are happier than us.

Because when they look up from paths sheltered in strings of brown-dry grass, where they bolt between refuge and peril, hugging the earth for warmth and protection,
what they see is this:

life bending back toward the wise ear of Home, and life swaying upward toward Solace.

I have covered a lot of territory in 500 pictures and so many thousands of words, inner world and outer world turning inside out, eavesdropping on a distant telepathy I strain to overhear and amplify, yearning to decode the secret of joy in me.

At last, you’ve shaken your wings
and broken the cage apart and
flown off into the unseen.
– Rumi

The weathered copper planter  moves in smooth, heavy turns beneath the kaleidoscope, so that you can watch the show as meticulously as you want through the eyepiece. I decided to see if I could make some snowflakes.  I held the rim of the big bowl and watched the shapes unspool, like whispers from an ancient prayer wheel.  Inch by inch, the feathery grey points of Dusty Miller (or is it artemesia?) melted into each other as honeycombs of hydrangea slid from view.   And then, as I’d hoped – just for you, just for Autumn – the first snowflakes of the year formed somewhere between the red starry skies and amethyst earth below.  It won’t be long, now, until they are here to stay.

Some delights are as simple and miraculous as they appear.  To watch as a few thin strips of mirror turn the world into an ever-changing array of gems – so magically unforeseeably, so gratifyingly predictable – you are more than a bystander.  You are involved in this coming together, this folding and re-folding.  You sense the same process is happening inside you – laid open by a trick of the eye, revealing an eternal flowering you otherwise could not see.

You are going to get the wrong idea from this picture about the scale of the Olbrich Garden Kaleidescope.  You wouldn’t know, if I didn’t tell you, that this is a very close-up crop of the pattern I saw – a pattern of honeycombs enclosing wine colored pockets, frosted with grey.  So I’ll show you one of the big, over all shots – in fact, maybe I’ll show you all of them.  But not today.

Because today, I want you to share that visceral focus I felt when the kaleidoscope turned.  My mind filled with petals and leaves, each one so specific and clear, their individuality reflected all the more fully through mirrors that recombined them into something they obviously aren’t.  And I knew I was seeing the pattern, yet experienced the breeze trembling in the petals as if my own hair had brushed my cheek.

It’s funny, this state of mind you get into looking through a kaleidoscope.  I think that dialogue between pattern and particular is a two way street our eyes navigate fearlessly, our hearts and minds less so.  Well, maybe our hearts are pretty brave when it comes right down to it.  But my mind – oh, it loves to inhabit the particular, and cringe away from the pattern – as if they were not equally part of a way of seeing something beautiful that, anyway, changes with the slightest November breeze.

Today I want to tell the terrible truth about yesterday.  The entire day of November 2, I did not consciously remember even once what day it was.  On November 1st, I remembered what day it would be tomorrow.  Even on October 31, I knew yesterday was coming.

I just couldn’t remember that for five years, from yesterday onwards, Dad isn’t here anymore.  Now I feel awful, like my brain was caked with some kind of insulation keeping out this one plain, precious fact.  I think my circuits are too overloaded for one more sadness.

I could have done something yesterday for my Dad, something from inside.  Maybe I did anyway.  With Dad, my remaining inner connection takes an uncertain form, a slowly rising silence like a question I can’t quite ask, yet somehow an answer comes.  It’s different from the flashes of intuition that clearly unfold from Mom – so specific, so real, they are like electric shocks.

The botanic kaleidoscope at Olbrich Gardens would have amused my Dad wonderfully.   He was not that grown-up of a kid, in the end – a blessing and a curse I have definitely inherited.  When I picture him standing with me there at the scope, watching the copper kettle of  desiccated blossoms rotate through the faceted reflections,  I see us about the same age – 8 or 9 or so, taking turns watching the wonders rise and fall.

I get to say this – the picture came first, and then the poem found me a few hours later.  Poetry has its mysterious ways, especially Rilke.  Thank you for visiting Autumn with me.  The trees and I will always remember.

Autumn by Rainer Maria Rilke

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,
as if orchards were dying high in space.
Each leaf falls as if it were motioning ‘”no.”

And tonight the heavy earth is falling
away from all other stars in the loneliness.

We’re all falling.  This hand here is falling
And look at the other one…It’s in them all.

And yet there is Someone, whose hands
infinitely calm, hold up all this falling.

From Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke,  by Robert Bly, 1981.

Its fun when you make something, and find a place you have never been before.  (Even if other people have gone there, its nice when you find it yourself.)