I'm in a yoga class again. If I'd stopped to count how many YEARS since my last experience with yoga, I might have signed up for the beginner class again. However, I managed to keep up this week, and I enjoy a challenge, so I'm staying.

Earlier I was talking about endings and beginnings. One of the new projects in my life has more or less come to me--it's taken hold of me and won't let go. A couple of experiences this summer inspired me to start researching and writing, and now I can't stop. It's creative nonfiction, which I have written before, but mostly in response to a death. Thankfully, no one had to die for me to write the essay cycle I'm working on now.

Or rather, people have died, but their deaths are important only in that they signify the passage of time, which in turn has somehow made me one of the (ostensible) adults in the world, someone with responsibilities like an actual grown-up.

Oh never mind. The point is, I'm stretching physically and professionally, and it feels good. I recommend it highly.

For some reason, I'm finding the change of season this year to be harder than usual. I'm really not sure why. I love autumn, even though I'm not technically on a school calendar and so have no real reason to buy notebooks and colored pencils (though I do anyway).

I have a little end-of-summer ennui most years, but it dissipates as I recognize yet again that I never have to leave here. Forty-odd years of leaving what always felt like home to "go home" to a version of life that felt temporary apparently created a lingering unconscious sense of impending doom. But I know better: Yes, I don't have to leave here this year, either. Still, that "oh no, not yet" feeling lingers.

Previously, I mentioned end-of-summer projects, both writing and other, and finding new goals. I've done a bunch of all of it. Of course, there's never enough time for all the summer projects, but we have managed some, in spite of too cold and wet, too hot and muggy, raining raining raining. Indoors and out, I can see both things that are different and things we never got around to fixing/finishing/changing.

And I know, ready or not, the seasons are changing. The heater has come on overnight a few times already. September has brought everyone's attention to the activities and meetings that they abandon during the summer. I'm actually quite excited by and absorbed in what I'm creating now. I'm mostly looking ahead. Except that I can't quite stop looking back.

So today I figured out something to help: Closing Time--not Leonard Cohen (though I'm a fan of this song), but instead, the Semisonic version. Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end. Yeah. That. It helps.