Autumn has a poignancy, along side the many pleasures of sight, sound and aroma, that strikes at a deep place within. Fall is a season of Masks, Myths, and Alchemy. It’s a season of appearances and essences. In the dark waters colored with glowing leaves, murky figures drift and linger. The Autumn moon seems sometimes singing, sometimes weeping, as it picks its way through the dying branches of black oaks. Frogs croak in the greenhouse in the early evening sunlight that’s become so orange and slanted that the eye is dizzied and the mind inebriated with hints of coming ends and of hidden beginnings. Hopes walk along with the shadows of chronic griefs yet unreleased. Samhain, the beginning of winter as the Celts once saw things, is a moment for facing this sometimes bewildering dichotomy beneath Autumn’s bright cloak. It offers humor (colorfully macabre) and harvest treats, and invites one to stretch out with the imagination into the “hidden realms” whence Soul’s emerge and whither they return.
Manzanita & Maple
The world maintains an illusion of persistence. Within the seemingly lasting is continual destruction and rebirth: coiled within every life is the serpent of its death; and folded within death is the foetus of new life.
Autumn helps keep one humble. New mysteries, new life, and new death, all intermingle in a festival of light and shadow. It’s our mind’s tendency to want a permanent separation between these “opposite” poles, but one’s constantly reminded, by the fact that they are part of every manifestation in life, that there is no separating them. They’re two sides of the same coin.
The opposite is beneficial:
from things that differ comes the fairest attunement…
– Heraclitus
“But every tension of opposites culminates in a release, out of which comes the ‘third.’ In the third, the tension is resolved and the lost unity is restored.”
– Carl G. Jung
“All beauty is the making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” – Eli Siegel [emph. added]
It’s not so much that there is an irreconcilable dichotomy in the world. It’s that the duality is an illusion and that the seeming opposites are faces of a single reality. Autumn helps us remember that by blending the lovely gift of the harvest and the beauty of nature, with the dark and sober truth of dying things and hidden mystery, one can transcend mere nostalgia and sentimentality, the fear of the future, the fear of life vs. death, and live fully in this moment. It’s as if Autumn puts “the Fall” to music in an alchemical theatrical event whose moral is that no one ever “fell” from anything but has always been living in this eternal now that transcends all understanding.
As Issa hinted in a haiku quoted earlier here, you can see infinity in the eye of the dragonfly. The whole world rolls past unhindered before that speck of consciousness, which rests solidly with itself no matter what. The husk of a dead cicada on a tree branch is a mute marker to all that she or he saw in the endless moments of its life: passing Ravens conversing with each other as they flew over the pine forest, foxes barking messages of food found and food lost across the fields, the orange domestic tabby sitting silently as the sun dropped behind the hill. And with those sights unfolded inner vistas that unfold still within that seemingly mysterious consciousness that continues beyond the mere dry husk of a no longer useful body. Within what “world” does it continue? The same world from which all this Autumnal beauty emerges, and to which it returns — repeatedly, and repeatedly.
This was lovely, Kevin. I love fall and this captures it wonderfully!
Have you sent these writings to Aunt Sherry? She might enoy them. Esther would like them ,too. I don’t know if she reads email. I should give her a copy. She wants a copy of your book of poetry when you have them.
Love to you,. Mom