All the recent rains have left the ground wet and the scent of fall permeates the air. "The scent of leaves becoming soil," as Max says. Our journal prompt for today situates itself among the fallen leaves and the awe inspired by the changing season. I gave Max the following quote from Annie Dillard's essay, "This Is the Life", and told him to write freely about how it made him feel and what it made him think.
People look at the sky and at the other animals. They make beautiful objects, beautiful sounds, beautiful motions of their bodies beating drums in lines. They pray; they toss people in peat bogs; they help the sick and injured; they pierce their lips, their noses, ears; they make the same mistakes despite religion, written language, philosophy, and science; they build, they kill, they preserve, they count and figure, they boil the pot, they keep the embers alive; they tell their stories and gird themselves.
Say you have seen something. You have seen an ordinary bit of what is real, the infinite fabric of time that eternity shoots through, and time's soft-skinned people working and dying under slowly shifting stars. Then what?
Annie Dillard
What indeed? I love the journal prompts that leave the doors wide open for whatever is coursing through his head.