September. I love September and its mellow, hallowed sun. I love its peace, its fruitfulness, its completeness, and its smiling willingness to forget itself and yield to autumn. This year there are no plums on my tree and few apples but it isn’t worried. There are seeds aplenty storing the bowels of this summer for the future. It is still green, a lazy mantle of life covering the land, filling and filled by the air. There are still roses, there is still warmth, there is always welcome.

The rain comes in bursts like a conversation, all day it is either wet or waiting in the wings. Right now it is so heavy you can hear it playing its own drums with crescendos and diminuendos to keep you listening. It is outside my window under the grey sky. It is out, I am in, it is loud, I am quiet, it is cold, I am warm, it is wet, I am dry. The rain is beyond me
but today it is defining me.

It is quiet in the study, reflecting the quietness in the house. The muffled sounds of passing cars are a wrapper for the silence. Outside the rain is falling. Inside it is warm like the inside of a body. Warm and still. I can let the stillness fill me, it is weighty like glory, like the presence of God. I can feel its tremor, its quickening, its life.