Grounded.

The weather is in the midst of turning--again.  Where I live these days, that means not knowing from day to day if the woolens will be needed (sweaters and mittens and socks) or if the short sleeved t-shirts will be all we can handle.

This adjustment also means that while soup season is techincally in full swing (we had a lovely chicken stew after church yesterday), sometimes cooler food is in order.  Summer's over, and fall is clearly here, but that only means that all of the bodies are in transition--the trees, the plants, the ground, and our own.

It's also midterm week, and all of the students and faculty are looking pretty frayed around the edges.  One of my colleagues pulled an all-nighter grading session last night, and another bemoaned the fact that she didn't--and still has about a hundred left to go.  We're all beat.

The exhaustion creeps in other ways, too, as we negotiate the steadiness of our lives interrupted by decisions and events (others' and our own) that move us to joy and frustration and pain and anticipation and excitement, turning (or returning) us to the source.

Paul Tillich often referred to God as "the ground of Being," and in our contemporary use, we often speak of being "grounded" in psychological as well as theological senses.  When it comes to the fall, I think of groundedness also in terms of what our farmers market turns us to, as we see more root vegetables come out, stronger (and uglier) and weightier than the summer produce.  We've come from the ground, the creation story tells us, and to it we'll return.  In the meantime, the ground is where we live; it is the constant from which we can't easily separate ourselves.

In many ways, the recent days feel like they've returned me to the ground--in exhaustion, in rockiness, in steep climbs and sharp corners.  But the ground is also the certainty and the absolute of what matters.  God's presence isn't up above my head; it's the ground underneath my feet.  And when I fall down, I'm even closer to it.