In the Autumn, there’s a way that things illuminate, break open, and reveal some previously undisclosed doorways into reality. Things are tenderized, in inner and outer nature.Unprotected, unguarded, unable to hide from the shimmering alive nature of reality, as it is, which is rarely going to conform to my own hopes and fears, or the fantasies I have about who I am, what this world is, what love is, what the Divine is.It’s just too wild and naked for all that. We can’t pin Reality down, wrap it up and resolve it into some nice tidy package, including through our great spiritual realizations; the Beloved is just too undomesticated for that, and just isn’t interested.There’s a certain sort of shakiness that can go with this, an atmospheric coloring of melancholy or sadness, but not a sadness where something is missing or in need of healing or transformation. It emerges somatically in response to some experience of overflow: this life and heart and the sensual world, the outpouring, it’s all just overflowing.It can burn at times, in the belly, heart, throat, the eyes, in the subtle body. A blazing aliveness and raging sort of awe at the whole thing.All expressions of the “blue ones,” a particular group of inner travelers, pieces of soma and soul who reside in the blue regions of the spectrum of consciousness; internal figures who carry tenderness, melancholy, shakiness, and grief.Where the heart is on the outside of the skin and not safely tucked away inside the rib cage. Fully exposed, naked, unguarded, its flesh just right there.A “sadness” that’s also quite full at the same time; somehow the emptiness and fullness come together, as One; not in response to something missing or lost that needs to be recovered, cured, or healed. But if you really gave yourself to that that it will take you to the ground, turn you to dust, with the moon looking down upon you.It seems this burning, this achy openness, this overflow, this being “turned to dust” is the direct response of the Beloved, the way she pours herself out of herself and into this world; they are her portals. Breathtaking, achy, tenderizing, pure joy.