October always feels like the year finally admitting something. The leaves let go — not because they have to, technically, but because it is time. I have always respected that particular form of honesty. Knowing when to release. Doing it anyway.
This is the month I end up writing things I've been circling all year: poems that have been waiting for the temperature to drop before they'd cooperate. I don't know why cold air is better for hard truths, but it absolutely is. Anyone who has tried to write something genuinely honest in August understands what I mean. August is too full of itself. October has nothing left to prove.
I had a lot on my mind in October 2022. There were things I was carrying that I'm not going to put here, because some stories live inside you and stay there — and that is not a failure; that is just how some chapters work. What I will say is that I was spending a great deal of time listening. To people. To my own thoughts. To the particular silence that follows the last warm day of the year when you know, without checking anything, that summer is genuinely done this time.
That, in the end, is what October gives me every year: a quieter permission to tell the truth. Not loudly, not theatrically, just with enough accuracy that the month can recognize itself on the page. I do not ask more than that from autumn writing, and autumn rarely asks less than my full attention in return.
I want that remembered because October 2022 was not merely atmospheric. It was clarifying. The month stripped away some of the noise around what I felt and what I owed the page. By the time the leaves were turning for real, I could hear my own life with a little less interference, and that made the writing more exact.
The Whisper of Time
In twilight's embrace, where shadows play, Ancient whispers breathe, in the olden way. Time trickles slow, beneath the moon's glow, In the heart of the night, secrets freely flow.
Read the full poem →Time is a strange traveling companion. It moves at different speeds depending on what you're navigating — embarrassingly fast when you want things to stay, painfully slow when you need them to change. I wrote "The Whisper of Time" thinking about all the things that live in the margins of our days: the conversations I almost had, the memories that surface at 2 a.m. without permission, the way fall evenings carry sound differently than summer ones. Something carries more when the air gets cold. I have never figured out whether that is meteorology or metaphor, and I suspect it doesn't matter.
In October I find myself writing longer, stranger, and more honestly than in any other month. Something about the shortening light makes the interior life more available. The hours between dinner and sleep get used for something other than whatever was on before. I am not saying October is my favorite month. I am saying it produces my best work, which might be the same thing.
I was still somewhere before Santa Fe that October — still in the middle of some things I needed to get through before I could get somewhere better. But I was writing. Writing is how I know I'm still okay. The day I stop writing is a day I'd prefer nobody to witness.
October says: the year is almost over. October also says: you still have time. Both are true, and both require your complete attention — which, incidentally, is the only appropriate response to a month this honest.