The woods is shining this morning.
Red, gold and green, the leaves
lie on the ground or fall,
hang full of light in the air still.

Wendell Berry

EPHEMERIS FOR THE FIRST WEEK OF MIDDLE FALL
    The Robin Migration Moon, having entered its second quarter on October 7, waxes gibbous until it becomes totally full on the 14th at 3:02 p.m. Rising in the afternoon to evening, setting in the early morning, this moon lies overhead  the middle of the night.

STANDING STILL
    It is always late September when I make my trip into Kentucky to meditate for a few days at Gethsemani monastery.
    Since I never see the monastery at any other time of year, my trip takes me out of the circular context of the world of Yellow Springs in which I normally live. When I arrive for my retreat, the same flowers are always in bloom, the same trees are turning, the same birds singing. Nothing has changed since the last time I came. Time has been held still by place.
    At home, I find no such stability. Every day, the markers of the year change just a little. The anchor is pulled up with each sunrise. Nothing stays the same. But at Gethsemani, like a childhood memory of home or a distant summer of love, like an old photograph revisited, or a repeating dream, the season remains frozen to its context.
    Before dawn, the sky spreads so deep above me, Orion always at the same stage of his ascent in the east, the Pleiades always overhead. Away from city lights, the sky is so dark and clear that I can always see the legs of Taurus, not just his red eye like here at home, and the Milky Way is almost as bright as a moon.
    Inside the chapel, the sun falls through the tall stained glass windows at the same angle at Vespers as it did last year and the year before and the year before. The solar clock has stopped here, has not passed through winter or spring or summer.
    I too am the same year after year, always looking for the same answers, never coming full circle, always staying suspended in autumn, never finished. And maybe that is all well and good. I will die, after all, in the world of circles, within the whole turn of some near or distant year. But in the few hours of retreat, I step outside the loop, hide from the inevitable, stand still in self-deception.
    The seasons at Gethsemani, I know, go around just like they do here in Yellow Springs. But I rationalize: I don’t really want to see behind the surface. I don’t want to see with the eyes of science and mathematics. I want to see with my own eyes the way things seem to be, and to live there in the presence of a tangible and non-transcendent landscape.
    After all, my knowledge that the world is round bears no relationship to my walks along the river in Glen Helen; I do not cling to the sycamores in order to be kept from being flung into space by the spinning globe. To my eyes that choose to see what is in front of me, the world is flat, and it is always late September at Gethsemani.