Autumn. We love it for the changing color in the leaves and the chill that comes with the forecast winter. We do those last minute chores like putting up our storm windows and putting down garden beds. And we start to think about chilly winter nights curled up with a book under a reading light, or in my case, time spent in the studio making art. I do love fall very much.

I have scurried in some of the plants from my patio and flower gardens that I want to overwinter. Some will live as they are and some will have a midwinter pruning and restart of cuttings in preparation for Spring. Either way it’s so uplifting to have all of the greenery and color inside the house.

My husband and I took a walk the other day and we started to see the little wooly caterpillars with wide center bands forecasting a long and snowy winter. Whatever you enjoy about winter, whether it’s books or art or napping or binging tv or getting together with friends for a little social nip, Autumn is the threshold to the next season and the next chapter of your life.

Do those activities that you know are important for your peace of spirit, your strength of mind, the health of your body and for the good of your people – those you love. Seek peace. Seek joy. Seek healing. Seek wisdom, and quietly express in whatever your preferred venue might be, what is important to be said. Share your grace. Your voice matters.

We tend to like making a plan and sticking to it. It’s vital when you’re making appointments, setting up dinner plans, scheduling a vacation, or even doing chores. We like to assure greater success by assessing variables like time or money or weather. A well made plan gives us a sense of security and larger positive return on our intent.

How do we schedule? How much time is needed and when to do it is based on proven parameters. We can look at the Weather Channel, recall the base speed of completion in the past, and the time we now have available. Then factor in our age, our physical ability, and variables like that and we feel pretty confident.

And then Murphy’s law kicks in.

As we get older and retire from our day jobs with our whiteboards and formal structure, we find ourselves relaxing the hard edges of scheduling. We sleep a little later, or decide we aren’t in the mood for today’s grocery run, and we shift. We relax. We get spoiled by less structure and rely on assist tools. It reminds me of how my Subaru beeps to tell me if I’m drifting over a line, or get too close when I back up, or slow my cruise control speed when I’m following too close on the highway. I resisted a little at first and then I kind of liked it, and eventually got just a little bit numb and dependent.

We get more comfortable with warning beeps and proudly step forward with a plan for a task – perhaps based on outdated parameters. Then we lift that pot that’s too heavy, hear a resounding pop, and our schedules are wiped off the whiteboard.

This picture of fall pumpkins looks like the reality I now need to embrace for my life. It is exciting … and pretty … and completely unpredictable. There is very little clear structure. There is a fabulous variety of color and the sky is reassuringly blue above, on most days. However, this new adventure into living with surprise asks us to pause and become a student again. We must learn to set aside our accepted parameters and hone our critical thinking skills again, because if you pick one pumpkin out of the new order, others could tumble. When that happens, and it will happen, it is important to remain calm and embrace where we are at that new moment with grace, agility and optimism. Like a new student, we need to take a deep breath and find joy in the learning process.

It can be awfully easy to feel defeated. We try to do something fruitful and it doesn’t turn out perfectly. We try to say something to someone and it’s misinterpreted. We buy lottery tickets and get back a $2 return if we’re lucky. We submit a piece of our creative work to a competition but never seemed to get juried in. It feels hard.

We may turn to friends or a spouse for validation and a pep talk telling us things are rosier than we feel. But then we don’t fully believe their optimism because they’re biased after all – they love us. The bottom line is we can’t let random scenarios make us feel bad. Odds are it’s not personal but just circumstantial. We shouldn’t always look to someone else to make us feel okay either. It isn’t fair to them.

Maybe we need to just have our down time. Feel it. Own it. Then find something just as random but positive to latch onto and get back up and begin again. It can be a small, positive image or moment. Here – borrow my fortune cookie from the other night. I choose to believe this message because cookies are unbiased and ALWAYS correct.

It’s funny, in a non funny kind of way, how every day has something wonderful and something mundane, something uplifting and something disappointing, something visually beautiful and something uncomfortably dissadent, and all of these mush together into this wonderful hodgepodge that our life is.

Today is a fair example. I heard that an artist I met this summer and admire was trying to reach me and it lifted my spirits. A prescription I was trying to get filled suddenly was. Then I had a creative notion about a new element for a painting I want to try and I got excited. Light came through the leaves of a tree in my yard and illuminated the berries there and dazzled them against the blue sky. I also heard back from a gallery where I had submitted some pieces for a show that they were putting together and all 5 submissions where declined. But the review with picture I wrote for an art box I bought on Amazon was accepted and put up. Isn’t it funny? What a wonderful day, really.

So I decided that instead of disappearing on this website for months at a time and popping in when I have a new painting and insight, maybe each week I’d make a post that was not profound but simply realistic.

Welcome to midweek musings.