Sweater Weather

“Life passes in an instant; the leaf doesn’t go back to the branch.” - Mirabai

“My Beloved is alone with me there, always.” - Rabi’a al Adawiyya

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This week is the unofficial beginning of the holiday season in my family. Both of my sons have birthdays, followed by Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, the New Year, my birthday at the end of January, and my daughter’s birthday in February. By then we are almost close enough to begin looking for signs of spring again. But first, and perhaps most importantly, it is sweater weather.

I love sweater weather with the same enthusiasm that Maya Rudolph and Amy Poehler brought to it as Jodi and Betty on SNL’s “Bronx Beat.” They could barely contain themselves. The air dropped a few degrees and suddenly the world had been reborn. Sweater weather! They announced it as if sweaters had just been invented and they had been selected to introduce them to the human race. This is very close to how I feel. I see one leaf turn orange and immediately want every pumpkin spice item ever created, although only in the fall. Pumpkin spice has a very specific window, in my opinion. Once Christmas arrives, it has had its time and needs to leave gracefully. Right now, though, I want the pumpkin spice protein powder, the candles, the coffee, the mums, the gourds in every possible size, and an unreasonable number of pumpkins both inside and outside my house.

I have loved fall since I was a little girl. It meant going out with my mother to buy new school shoes, buying uniforms and having them hemmed, getting a haircut, and best of all, buying school supplies. I loved the clean notebooks, new pens and pencils, and the feeling that a new life could begin because I had a fresh box of crayons. I still feel some version of that every year. The first cool morning arrives, I pull out my sweaters and sweats, the house feels cozier, and there is an invitation in the air to slow down and turn inward.

This desire to turn inward stood in fairly dramatic contrast to my actual life last night. My daughter called from Portland because it was my younger son’s birthday and was on speaker phone talking to my son in the Great Room where I was trying to complete one final edit of Chapter Four of my dissertation before the semester deadline. I also had the Wednesday night Family Meeting for my spiritual group open on Zoom. My picture was displayed rather than my live video, and I was trying to focus on the readings and on one of our members, who is a professional singer, as she sang while I had Kathy’s music playing on my television. My two white German Shepherds barked gleefully through all of it. I suddenly pictured myself as the Hindu goddess Durga, with many arms, each arm reaching toward something different while I tried to keep everything balanced.

This is partly why I decided to take the semester off from school. I need to focus on my dissertation and the personal writing that has been waiting for me, but I also want enough room to stare out a window without feeling that I should be doing three other things. I want long drives through the foliage of the Northeast. Soon I will have my hiking partner back, whom I lose every summer to her garden, and we can walk again in the brisk weather and crunchy leaves, enjoying Mother Nature in all her fall glory. More than anything, I want enough space to become quiet again.

That quiet is one reason I have gone to bed around seven in the evening for the past several years so that I can rise between two and three and meditate properly. The mystics have called the hour between three and four in the morning the hour of elixir, when the outer world is silent and the inner atmosphere seems clearest. There are fewer phones, dogs, emails, and people needing answers. It is easier then to gather the attention at the eye center, the place between and slightly above the eyebrows that Sant Mat calls the seat of the soul and begin the journey within.

Fall seems to strengthen that inward pull, and as I have grown older, it has become more than a season I enjoy. Since my birthday is at the end of January, this is the time when I naturally begin assessing the year that has passed and thinking about the year ahead. I look at what I have accomplished personally and spiritually, what I have left unfinished, and what I want to do with the time that is coming. Recently I watched a beautiful documentary about the poet, Mary Oliver, and found myself returning to her question, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” At sixty-two, with my sixty-third birthday coming in January, that question lands differently than it did twenty or thirty years ago.

I eat well, lift heavy weights, walk, and do yoga, even as I live with lupus. Still, I am increasingly aware of time. My oldest son turns thirty-seven this week, which hardly seems possible, and I have spent much of this year in hospitals with people I love. My trainer is at the age when everyone is getting married and having babies. I am at the age when even very fit people discover that bodies require repairs, longer recoveries, or at least much more patience than they once did.

As we grow older, life seems shorter in hindsight. Years that once appeared to stretch endlessly ahead of us collapse into a few vivid memories. Mystics tell us that an earthly lifetime passes in the blink of an eye, while also reminding us that a human birth is an immeasurable gift. In this human form, with the upright spine and the capacity to focus at the third eye, we have the opportunity to turn our attention inward and begin the return to our Source. Time may be an illusion, but while we are living inside of it, it certainly knows how to move.

Perhaps fall affects me so deeply now because it makes the passage of time visible. The trees release what they have spent the year producing. Animals gather what they need and prepare to go deeper inside. Daylight withdraws earlier and earlier, and even the sun seems to be turning inward. Fall does not feel like death to me. It feels like longing. It feels as if the earth itself remembers that what we see on the surface is not the whole of life.

This season is bittersweet for another reason. It was at this time of year that my beloved Param Sant Satguru Kathy left Her mortal coil. I am stunned that it has been almost nine years. Entire lifetimes seem to have passed since She left, and yet this year I feel Her closer than ever. There has not been a day when I have not thought about Her, but some seasons bring stronger longing than others. I miss Her laugh, Her voice and songs, Her sense of humor, the look in Her eyes, and the way I felt in Her presence.

Near the end of Her life, I would go to Her room after work. As soon as I sat down, I would look at Her, smile, and say, “Base.” It felt as though I had been out in the game of life all day and had finally reached home plate. I could stop running. I did not need to explain because She already knew me, including what I still concealed from myself. That home plate is buried deep inside me now, in Sach Khand where She resides. Some days it feels impossibly far away, and on others it feels almost within reach.

That distance between feeling Her impossibly far away and almost within reach is part of what Kathy taught us about longing and yearning. It is not ordinary sadness. Longing is the soul remembering that nothing in this world can satisfy it completely because this world is not its true home. Yearning gives that recognition direction, turning the ache toward the Beloved and pulling the attention upward. This longing is not weakness. It is love stripped of every lesser object.

Kathy also taught that longing must rest upon trust. She said, “The most important part, Maharaj Ji told me, it’s the longing and the yearning, but you don’t long and yearn for that which you don’t understand or not yet trust. So, the base is trust. The base is trust.” In another Satsang She explained, “Acceptance means trust. The basic foundation for the longing and yearning, the seeds of longing and yearning, to grow, without hindrance, without twisting, turning away from the sun because of the darkness of the shadow. Trust. Trust is your light. Work on it.”

My trust in Kathy is unbreakable. She taught us that the Master does not leave the initiate when the physical body is gone. The outer form changes, but the inner relationship remains. Sant Mat teaches that the living Master initiates the seeker into meditation on the inner Sound and Light and assumes responsibility for guiding that soul, Home. The initiate follows the tenets of the Path, including a vegetarian diet, abstinence from alcohol and mind-altering drugs, and two and a half hours of daily meditation. The Master guides the soul, slowly and slowly, back to its true home in Sach Khand.

That promise does not remove us from the world we are living in, which may be why Kathy’s words about trust feel especially important now. The world appears increasingly unstable on geopolitical, environmental, and personal levels. My work accelerates as companies use year-end budgets and everyone tries to close sales before the holidays. The holidays bring beauty, but also motion, obligation, noise, shopping, and travel. I feel urgency to complete projects I began years ago, while another part of me wants to become quiet enough to understand why I am completing them at all.

Maybe this is why “wherever you go, there you are” arrived three times yesterday. A blogger mentioned Jon Kabat Zinn’s book and showed the cover to the camera. Later, one of our members, who is a professional singer, sang her own song with that title. Then another member held up the book during Family Night and said she was using it in her own work. It is difficult not to notice that many coincidences in one day. Kathy spoke about this truth often. We carry our consciousness wherever we go. A new city, season, or year cannot free us from the mind we bring along. The Path is not an escape from life. Meditation allows us to meet it from a deeper place.

For someone who is new to Sant Mat, the practice is simple to describe and takes a lifetime to live. We gather our attention at the eye center through repetition of the Holy Names given at initiation, contemplate the form of the Master, and listen for the inner Sound. The mind and soul have been knotted together for countless lifetimes, and meditation slowly begins to separate them. We do not have to accept this as a theory. The purpose of the practice is experience, but experience comes through regular effort, the grace of the Master, and the discipline of returning to meditation each day. The candles, sweaters, changing leaves, Mary Oliver documentaries, meaningful coincidences, mystical books, and beautiful fall drives may awaken something in me, but they cannot meditate for me. They can only remind me to return to the practice through which Kathy’s presence has become part of me.

That presence feels written more deeply than words. I have several tattoos that can be seen, but the one buried deepest within me is visible to no one. It is Kathy's name upon my heart and Her image imprinted on my third eye, just above and between my eyebrows, in the seat of the soul where the mind and soul are knotted together. Everything else changes. Bodies age, children grow up, leaves fall, years pass, and the people we love leave their physical forms. The Master’s mark remains.

Outside my window, the rosebushes are holding their last blooms. Soon they will appear dead, and next year they will rise again. We are much the same. For many lifetimes we wrap ourselves in one thin sheet after another and forget what lies beneath. Then the Master comes and reminds the soul of its own season, its own direction, and its true home. Fall has always made me excited about what is coming. Now it also asks me what, beneath all this change, has never left.

So I will put on a sweater, drink something pumpkin-spiced, and bring mums and gourds into my home for the season. I will walk beneath the turning trees with my dogs. I will look toward New York City, where the shopping, lights, and holiday events are always at their best in fall and early winter. I will finish what I am here to finish, but I will also make room to stare out the window. Then, before the world wakes, I will sit in the darkness, gather the many arms of my attention back into myself, and turn toward Home.