November Indian Summer

November and we are having a beautiful Indian summer--days when outdoors feels wonderfully warm. My California friend, Sam, who does not particularly like the weather in the Northeast, is wearing shorts while i'm in corduroys and perspiring.

I think of Indian summer as September or October. This early November is surprisingly lovely and warm.

Many trees are bare. The oaks have lost their beautiful red sheen and turned brown. A few poplars shake their round yellow leaves. I live in a grove of beech, which cling to their copper leaves all winter. I never thought i'd say it: browns are beautiful.

Nowadays, many of us experience aging like Indian summer. Yes, we are past the half-way mark, maybe past the three-quarters mark of our years, yet we too remain warm and lively. Some of our friends have lost all their leaves. Our own skin is sprinkled with brown age spots. The end of the year is coming. Winter is coming. We know that. But today is warm and heavenly.

Coming to Peace with Nature by Dawn Downey, Guest Blogger

This year I'm coming to terms with nature. Starting right now.

Nature means trees: ticks dropping out of them, spider webs stretched between them, and snakes curled up at their roots. I dislike these things. I walk every day, but choose sidewalks and treadmills, preferences no doubt borne from my suburban upbringing.

In April, my husband and I hiked in Wallace State Park. He studied the map painted on a wooden placard and selected Rocky Ford Trail, labeled moderate. As directed, we crossed a dam and headed for the trail. Once across Ben veered right. I continued straight. "How the hell did you know to turn?"

He pointed to a spot a couple yards beyond where he'd stopped. Sure enough, a trail, but it petered out into the patch of weeds at my feet. My attempt to understand the natural world was doomed. Hopeless. Mother Nature had failed to provide me the gene that signals where to change direction in the absence of street signs.

The trail wound through oaks still naked from winter. Bone white sycamore skeletons reached skyward, as it ran parallel to a stream. We stopped where a waterfall trickled over a limestone shelf. Cardinals sang accompaniment to the gurgling creek. The music so delicate you had to hold you breath to take it in. It nourished even a room service kind of girl like me. Lesson one: listen.

Shrub Season

Except for oaks and beeches, most trees have lost their leaves. The landscape begins to look rather bare, but around the edge of the lawn, shrubs are shining red, orange, yellow, and even pink. Thank goodness for shrubs!

We love our shrubs when they bloom in the spring. Now they draw our attention again as their late autumn leaves color our personal landscape. Spectacular Japanese maples redden or else yellow into orange. Weeping cherries and magnolias are yellow. Double-file viburnums turn dark red. Even that lazy old forsythia, who has been resting on its early laurels for six months, finally DOES something as its leaves tinge toward red potato skin.

The lives of many octogenarians are weakening of failing as their limbs stand bare in anticipation of the coming deep freeze. But some few of these 80-somethings are still going full steam, and they draw our attention. I want to be like that, we think, as if we have the choice.

Our choice is now, while we are young: daily exercise, a nourishing diet, and mindfulness.

When the body finally becomes completely bare of energy in the late autumn of our lives, mindfulness is the only thing that remains.

As one dying friend quipped: her life is now only "Bed, Bath, and soon to be Beyond."

Her advice: Be present.

When We Can't See the Forest for the Trees

Driving home from Boston late Saturday afternoon in the pouring snow and without snow tires :( we found a B&B in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire and homed in for the night. Sunday morning dawned with a blue sky and melting-wet roads.

We drove home through the spectacular beauty of snow-laden pine trees interspersed with khaki green, gold-brown oak trees that still have all their leaves. The combination made for beautiful mottled hillsides. I really had no idea of the dense oak population in New Hampshire forests.

We often can't see the forest for the trees. We are so focused on the thoughts in the mind that we don't notice the mind itself. We "believe" our thoughts and think they are real when they are but momentary firings of neurons, passing through quickly. And then they are gone.

We've had 10,000 thoughts in the past 24 hours. Where are they now?

We've been so intent on the trees (i.e., our thoughts), that we haven't noticed the forest of the mind just being there.