November, the time of returning to yourself

Dear Journal,

November came in without knocking. I did not hear it coming. One morning, the light had changed: lower, more golden, as if laid at a slant across things. The shadows lengthened from midday. The sea had taken on that slate colour I only see in this season, when the tourists have gone and it finally becomes itself again.

I love this month that is loved so little. People call it grey, sad, endless. They step over it, already thinking of the holidays. Yet there is a wisdom in November that the other months lack. It promises nothing. It does not seduce. It is content to be what it is: a passage.

I walked for a long time this weekend. Under my feet, the leaves made that dry, soft sound, like paper crumpled with care. The trees shed their leaves without resisting. They do not cling to what has been. They let fall, one leaf after another, what nourished their summer and would now weigh down their winter. I wondered when I had learned to let go with such grace. The answer came straight away: never really.

For human beings hold on. We hold on to our memories, our regrets, our unfinished projects, our old angers carefully folded at the bottom of a drawer. We even hold on to what hurts us, because the known is more reassuring than the void. We have made accumulation a virtue, and loss a fault. Nature does not know this vocabulary. It loses nothing. It transforms.

This falling leaf will become humus. This humus will feed the root. This root will carry, in spring, a new shoot. Nothing ends, everything settles. And perhaps that is the true teaching of autumn: what we let go of is not lost, it is offered to what is coming.

So I try, dear Journal. I try to be like the tree. To look at what, in me, has had its day. Certain beliefs, which protected me for a long time and which today stop me from breathing. Certain habits, now empty automatisms. Certain expectations of others, of Life, of myself. I do not tear them out. I look at them, I thank them, and I let them slip away.

It is not always comfortable. Shedding leaves you bare. There are evenings when the emptiness feels like a lack, when the early darkness awakens old melancholies. I welcome them too. They are part of the journey. You do not cross a season with your eyes closed.

November invites us to go home. Home in the simplest sense: lighting a candle earlier, making a herbal tea, wrapping up in a blanket, letting the night come without a fight. And home within, in the deepest sense: returning to that quiet centre the bustle of summer had made us forget. It is always there, that centre. It is simply waiting for us to visit.

I think of the seed, hidden under the cold earth. From outside, nothing is happening. You might think it is asleep, that it has given up. And yet, in the secrecy of the dark, it is preparing. It gathers its strength. It does not need light to know it will flower. It only needs time, and trust.

Perhaps we are, right now, that seed. Perhaps what looks like a pause is in fact invisible work. Our society values what can be seen: production, performance, movement. It has forgotten the value of fertile rest, the kind that produces nothing immediate but makes everything possible.

This morning, before dawn, I sat facing the window. I watched the sky turn from black to blue, then from blue to pale pink. I did nothing else. I did not check my phone, I did not plan my day. I just breathed. And in that silence, I felt something settle, like cloudy water that finally clears and reveals the bottom.

There is a particular beauty in the slowness of November. A beauty that does not shout, that does not impose itself. You have to lean in to see it: the drop hanging from a branch, the mist lingering on the hills, the last rose holding on against the garden wall. These little things speak to me more than the great spectacles of summer. They remind me that Life goes on, discreet and faithful, even when everything seems to withdraw.

So I wish myself, and I wish us all, a November fully lived. Not a month to get through while waiting for better, but a month to live for what it offers: the chance to set things down, to turn inward, to prepare in silence for the light that will return.

Because it will return, dear Journal. It always does. And on that day, we will be ready to welcome it, lightened of what we had the courage to let fall.

✦