First Cold Front

The first cold front of the season rolled through this morning.  Just as the first, tentative day of spring is bitterly cold, more winter than spring, in northern climates, here in Austin, the first cold front rarely brings much change.  The wind flipped around, flowing from the north instead of the south.  Clouds blocked the sun for part of the day, lowering the high temperature of the afternoon from the 100+ range down to the mid-nineties.  It is still very hot, but today's north wind promises that change is coming, that temperatures will fall, sometime in the next several weeks.

The temporary change in the wind also signals that my transition is coming to an end.  At the end of May, I left a job that did not suit me, finally making formal an ending that I had been carrying within me for too long.  In the weeks since then I have inhabited what William Bridges calls the "neutral zone" of the transition, the unstructured space between ending and beginning that, for me, for this transition, included a lot of yoga, a lot of reading and writing, as much gardening as I could manage in the heat, and an intentional lack of doing.  Now that I am reaching the other side of the transition, I find that I have become attached to the undefined space of the in-between.  Beginning again requires moving from the comfort of thought into action.

So, action:

This will be the space where I will record what comes next.  When the weather allows, I'm going to plant my cool-season greens garden.  With the help of a few ground-soaking rains, I hope to convert more of my yard, which is really a mowed, dried-up weed patch, into productive garden space.  As the temperatures drop, and cooking with heat becomes practical again, I want to make meals based around plants from the garden and food from the farmer's market.  And I plan to spend plenty of weekend afternoons walking with Lee down the greenbelt, watching the Austin version of the seasons changing.  Simply put, I want to connect with, and write about, my dealings with the plants in my life.