And it’s morning, and I’m walking Kora in downtown Salt Lake City, close to the big temple.

It’s the last two days I’m sitting for her family because they’re moving to Park City so I am feeling that—saying goodbye to Kora as well as Twix and Breezy—and confronting the dynamic nature of life and the beauty inherent in the savoring of something knowing in advance that it won’t last.

And the trees are half-in and half-out of Fall—some with green foliage attached— and the leaves that are on the ground are not yet soggy almost as if the night is still hanging on to summer.

And people are always friendly down here. As they walk to their service work for the LDS church they wear name badges, and in suits and dresses, stiffly hold hands with their spouse of 30 years. In unwavering focus on their perceived devotion to God, they float Softly within a padded existence of religion, giving hearty good mornings to strangers because that’s protocol, and act out devotion, playing into the substance of the “Vast Other” through small talk and worlds external to their own vulnerable emotional spaces. She’s “happy”; he’s “happy”; and heavenly father walks with them in their union, like two human beings dictated into existence, floating by in an Elder Smith nametag and flowered rayon skirt like paper dolls astride the knowing silence of immeasurable potential that is (to me) the deeper experience known as God.

And inside my own (often) bubbling, frothy mental space this morning it’s becoming more clear than ever that two disparate truths can coexist. That these religious people and my self and Kora are living a unified whole.

Because on this morning of balancing between seasons, the leaves pull aside summer with such grace it becomes a seduction, and walking beside sterile couples searching for an experience of anything but, I’m inside my life with even more ferocity. For walking a path of meaningful togetherness is fertile for revelations of self when nametagged people (futilely labeling limitlessness) are the seasons of humanity bearing leaves of different growth. Where resting into a morning is a synchronicity in which we’re all just fragments of a larger creation breathing itself into being.�

And in the sight of such blending, I can see my depths more clearly, for we do not have to understand the truths of another to become more whole because of them. And so it is that from sterility and vastness, goodbyes and protocol, on a fall morning, I walk beside the seasons, like a Summer giving itself constantly to Autumn.