My soul feels thin, this season. All Saints, visitations, All Souls’ remembrances, lengthening nights, the light receding, thin, stretched, a veil, a thin place. I’m a thin place. And like the landscape changing around me, so much is shedding, turning colors, drying up, drifting down, settling somewhere, I don’t know where. So much death, so much grief now, every day with the Coronavirus, so much helplessness against the hardened hearts of foolish leaders, and their incessant lies. There’s solace in the land, the earth, the sky, and changing light, as long as I don’t think too immediately of climate change, and wonder about which species are dying off today, which village is under water, which forest on fire, which earthquake, in what country. Overwhelming, and my soul is thin, too thin.

The strange comfort is living with someone with brain cancer so far has been luminous. Maybe we are both becoming thin places. His spirit is full of light. He is full of joy, and is not in pain. We both thank God for that, as well as good medicine and good science, and good doctors. Every day is different, some soft and gentle, others harder, depending on the chemotherapy cycle. Family and friends come and sit or walk, sometimes with gifts of food, or help with shopping. So far we’ve been able to be outside, though it’s colder now, and like most people we are wondering how to manage seeing others. Most days, I am quiet in myself, and for that I am grateful, too. The big decisions have been made already. Perhaps that is a gift of the thin season of November, too, of winds sweeping leaves away, and then great stillness, of lowering skies, and bright winter birds returning: the juncos arrived the other day. Grebes and mergansers are back. Tonight, a thin moon followed the sunset, a curve of silver, catching the last of the evening light.