November

So here we are in November. I just turned the page on my Love's Freeway calendar to find Le Port de Cassis there to accompany my days this month. It surprised me a bit, that I'd chosen this image to represent this month. Then I remembered the reasoning behind the choice.

I took the photo in mid October, 2008. I had been swimming in the Mediterranean Sea that day. Hiking les Calanques wearing shorts and not much else, working up a good sweat in the hot sun, meeting at the finish with the reward of a refreshing plunge in one of the turquoise-fingered inlets along that craggy coastline west of Marseille. So although this image of a tranquil, sunny sea port, of strolling in short sleeves, of dining en terrasse may not fit a New Englander's experience--soup making and frost on the pumpkin and fires in the hearth and all--it's a match to what our friends in the south of France (not to mention other parts of the world) are enjoying.

It's hot hot hot, a beach day in Tel Aviv today, my friend Alon tells me. This sugar maple tree, burnishing orange and red by my Jamaica Plain window, is my friend Martine's gold and redenning Provencal vineyard along her back path. Tel Aviv will have its autumn, and Provence its winter, but not yet, not now. It is good to remember this, I think, good to be reminded to hold an expanded view. My experience is not others' experience. That's why I chose this image: for its gentle nudge to look beyond the immediate--beyond the periphery even--to the coming and going, the arising and diminishing, the sprouting and fading. What's here is passing; what's there is arising. None is better than the other, and each has its perfect place and part in the graceful, rhythmic, perpetual turning of the wheel.