There is a question I keep asking myself at the end of every summer — not "what did I accomplish" or "where did I go" but something simpler and considerably harder: am I actually making a difference to anyone? September has this way of making you honest. The long, generous days of summer start shortening, and with them, the comfortable distractions. Whatever you've been avoiding all year starts clearing its throat.
I met Monique in August on a boat between Lake Erie islands, and somehow — in that completely accidental way that the universe arranges its best surprises — she became a real friend in about six hours flat. That kind of connection is rare. That kind of person: the kind who shows up fully, laughs easily, and means what they say. I drove home from that trip thinking about what it means to be a guiding light for someone. Not a lighthouse, dramatic and permanent on a cliff. Just a candle. Just enough. Showing up in the dark and staying lit.
I wrote this entry thinking about the quieter forms of light people carry for one another all year long. September gave me that question honestly, without holiday staging: who stays warm, present, and steady when someone else needs help finding their way back to themselves?
September also taught me that small forms of steadiness count more than we give them credit for. A real friend met by chance. A candle instead of a bonfire. A single choice to keep showing up with warmth when easier instincts might have withdrawn. I trust the month because it stayed modest about light and still managed to say something essential about how people carry one another.
I also think September asks harder questions about light than winter does because September has not fully committed to darkness yet. The candle matters there in a different way. It is not ritual or holiday decoration. It is a choice. A decision to begin carrying warmth before the season makes it obvious that warmth will be needed. That made the month feel more active to me. Not nostalgic, active.
Light’s Embrace
In quiet halls where shadows creep, Where dreams lay low, and silence deep, All I wished in moments steep, Was for someone to break this sleep.
Read it in Echoes: Whispers From The Soul →That is why the friendship with Monique matters inside this entry too. Meeting someone who shows up fully can change what sort of light you believe is possible to carry yourself. September 2022 held that lesson quietly, and I wanted the finished version to give it proper space.
September 2022 had a particular quality of horizontal gold light in the late afternoon that made me want to stop everything and just be with people I loved. I hadn't moved to Santa Fe yet. I was still in an earlier chapter of my life — one I'll refer to mostly by its silhouette rather than its specifics, because some periods are better honored than detailed. What I will say is that I was already learning, slowly, to choose the people who chose me back. That sounds obvious. It absolutely is not.
The written word is another way that I process everything — joy, grief, confusion, gratitude. Some lines come to me in parking lots. Some at 3 a.m. when the room is quiet and the thoughts are emphatically not. This one came on a Sunday morning in September when the light was doing that thing it does and I was sitting with coffee that had gone fully cold because I'd gotten distracted staring at the sky again. I was thinking about what it actually costs to carry a candle for someone else when your own match is running low. Giving six months prior, I just came out of a lenglthy season where my candle had been withered down to a flicker. Embers of light, begging for oxygen. Would I have enough breath to enlighten anothers candle.
The answer, for the record, is everything and nothing. You give. You refuel. You give again. Occasionally you sit down and write a poem about it at 6 a.m. before anyone is awake to witness the process. That is the whole system, and it works better than anything else I've tried.
Let the candle metaphor stay modest — not a bonfire, not a stadium spotlight. Just a single, steady flame in a window for whoever needs to see light. As it turns out, that is enough. It almost always is.