October Nights

So I like that idea. The one about Bible-black October nights. About the cold and bound silences of a now early evening darkness. Of the unseen and barely perceptible stirring of a leaf loosed from its moorings. Every noise and silence and motion is different. Nature is preparing for what's coming. For when, it is unsure, but the hatches are being battened down. And a chill sweeps over the land. We are mostly unaware, moved on by the perpetual kinetic energy in our own lives. But October is a cosmic catalyst for a new season. It is the thunderstorm of seasons. The hot summer nights colliding with the cool winter breezes. Some days and nights, the summer wins; it is the winter that emerges victorious. And in the Bible-black cover of night, we feel it most deeply, most religiously.

Now I realize it's a juxtaposition of ideas. A mixing, or, rather, a misuse of metaphor, but October is the perfect month for the baseball playoffs. Of silence and shouts; of loosed screams of joy and, if we're fortunate enough, a Felix Culpa. Every pitch means something different. Every cut fastball, called third strike, ground ball to third, double to right. It's all different. It's all for something that's coming. That's just around the next corner. Victory is sweet. I have tasted it. Felt it cool down my scream-torn throat. Basked in it's warmth, overcome by it's chilling reality: victory.

So listen for that imperceptible sign. That noise or silence that brings it all down in a rush. We will fight sleep and our kinetic lives to sit in quiet on cool couches in warm breezes on these cataclysmic nights. These Bible-black October nights.

May we not go silently into these good nights.