Late but lovely, October took its good old time visiting its splendor upon us. But that's okay. It means that November will be something more than a gray limbo between autumn and winter, as the fall colors spill over into next month.
My day off this week was a glorious Thursday. It's such a rare gift these days to get three full hours to wander free amid the beauty of the season--whatever season it may be, but especially the fall.
As with all things beautiful, by the time it's upon you, it's almost over. If, as I theorize, all times are happening simultaneously, and we're only experiencing them as a march of minutes and days in succession (yesterday, today, tomorrow), then I take comfort in the belief that the brilliant autumn day I just had lives on forever in the very mind of God. It's still occurring and will forever.
Of course, when I say "God," I'm not referring to the Republican bully who passes for a Supreme Being in most people's imaginations. I'm speaking only of the Mystery at the heart of all life, the Mystery and the Energy that is life itself, the Infinite, the Ineffable, the Numinous--perhaps the reality that we take for granted, not so much a "being" as the ground of all being.
And yet, as transcendent and distant as that "God" seems, I must admit that She draws quite near on a gorgeous autumn day--indeed maybe on wretched days, too, though we fail to know Her then. It's hard to deny the Mystery of life and breath and seasons when the world is so lovely.
Giddy as I was for the color and the beauty of it all, there's a melancholy about it, too. Or maybe pensiveness is a better word, I don't know. Shakespeare's Sonnet 60 always runs through my head in the woods in the fall. In fact, I fitted it into a nondescript little tune that I sometimes sing to myself.
I don't know if we live too long or too short, but as long as I live, I can never tire of October. The chill in the air, gold-tinted sunlight, the cold mornings when dad (me) is still holding out, trying not to turn on the furnace, the distinctive smell of burning dust when he finally gives in. And of course the glorious colors in otherwise ordinary trees. Besides, as I said above, it seems to me that maybe we live forever, that everything that ever was still is, along with everything that will ever be. The question is, do we only get a single run; do we only get to taste it all just this once?
No comments:
Post a Comment