Fell asleep on my birthday eve with one word running through my head:  “humility humility humility”. Perhaps it is the effect of being in the woods and living in a funny freezing little home in the forest for a year. Perhaps it is the knowledge of how little I know about how the decades that are coming will unfold and how much of one’s life rests on being OK with uncertainty. Perhaps it is the waves of gratitude as I feel bowled over by the intensity of the beauty of Autumn here.

This season is an explosion of dense vegetal matter. Colour everywhere: mahogany and azures and ever-vital greens.

This year I feel grateful for the social movements emerging, taking to the streets, and to the banks of the rivers: coming together for the waters, for human rights and animal rights, and futures on this earth. I have been fed well by stories and songs around fires, dances and deep conversations, grateful for honesty and courage.

This year has taught me something about humility in communication. Laying down quick judgement and bold statement for curiosity in listening to others: to really hear how it is for them. Listening itself always participates in midwifing a meaning that is struggling to be born. This mystery between speaking and receiving, stretching to take aboard different perspectives and wisdom, so that our thinking is receptive, and our actions informed. Sharing more than we can explicitly account for.

I’m learning to lay down the attempt to say everything with words. Some things are known and some feelings grow clear across time. It is often – most often! – much more important to go outside rather than to say it all. To go outside and tread softly in the woods and move with deeper time.

Perhaps it is not words themselves that are the problem, but the limited ways we learn together. They say in Sanskrit they have 96 words for love – I don’t know if that is true – but I’m glad wiser cultures kept expanding their vocabularies creatively. Let’s find ways to listen for subtle differences. Let’s keep exploring how to create languages together. And what we can’t say, we can live.

I feel grateful for life in the Liss forest, for bringing up my daughter and for relationship with this place – in all its forms – and all the unexpected creatures that turn up outside our door. Llamas, with their friendly nobility. Horses galloping across the fields at night. Wood pigeons who sit together on telephone wires like deities watching over the forgetful dance of the human world, calling to us with warbled cries to remember that our hearts are bright green new shoots.

The stars are intense tonight. Go outside.