In My Season is the quietest song on the record. Track 9. Nothing left to prove.
The World card opens this album and closes it. Rising Phoenix is The World as death and rebirth, the burning, the coming apart. In My Season is The World again, turned over. Same card. Completion where there was destruction. I did not plan that symmetry when I started. I noticed it after the songs were already done, and it stopped me for a second.
That is the thing about arrival. You rarely feel it happening. You look up one day and the fight is over and nobody announced it.
What completion actually sounds like
I expected the last track to be triumphant. A big finish. Horns, a crowd, a victory lap after eight songs of work. It did not want to be that. Every time I pushed it toward loud, it went flat. In My Season only worked when I let it settle.
Completion is a temperature. The body stops bracing. The shoulders come down. You stop waiting for the other shoe because you already survived the fall.
The whole album is a journey through nine cards. Burn, hope, choose, withdraw, draw the line, protect the joy, move, command, arrive. By the time you reach The World the second time, the calm is a receipt. You paid for it in months nobody watched.
The season nobody schedules
I called it In My Season because seasons are not achievements. You do not win spring. It comes because the ground did its slow work through a winter nobody clapped for.
Most of what got me here happened in private. The songs people skipped. The months I did not post. The version of me that kept building when there was no evidence it would matter. None of that shows in a finished track. The track only shows the after.
I still catch myself reaching for the next thing before I have felt this one. Arrival makes me nervous. If I am here, then the striving that kept me company for years has to loosen its grip, and I do not fully know who I am without it. That part is not resolved. I am learning to sit in a season instead of sprinting out of it.
What In My Season knows
The World does not close with a bang. It closes with a full circle. The dancer in the center of the card is not celebrating. She is complete.
In My Season is for the person who did the quiet work and is not sure they are allowed to stop. Who keeps waiting for a sign that they have arrived, when the arrival is the stillness itself.
You are in your season. You do not have to announce it. Let it hold you.