Autumn: When death and elegance walk hand in hand

Autumn is a season of great beauty, but it is also a season of decline: the days grow shorter, the light is suffused, and summer’s abundance decays towards winter’s death.  Faced with this inevitable winter, what does nature do in autumn?  It scatters the seeds that will bring new growth in the spring—and scatters them with amazing abandon.

In my own experience of autumn, I am rarely aware that seeds are being planted.  Instead, my mind is on the fact that the green growth of summer is browning and beginning to die.  My delight in the autumn colors is always tinged with melancholy, a sense of impending loss that is only heightened by the beauty all around.  I am drawn down by the prospect of death more then I am lifted by the hope of new life.

But as I explore autumn’s paradox of dying and seeding, I feel the power of the metaphor.  In the autumnal events of my own experience, I am easily fixated on surface appearances—on the decline of meaning, the decay of relationships, the death of work.  And yet if I look more deeply, I may see the myriad possibilities being planted to bear fruit in some season yet to come.

In retrospect, I can see in my own life what I could not see at the time—how the job I lost helped me find work I needed to do, how the “road closed” sign turned me toward terrain I needed to travel, how losses that felt irredeemable forced me to discern meanings I needed to know.  On the surface, it seemed that life was lessening, but silently and lavishly the seeds of new life were always being sown.

This hopeful notion that living is hidden within dying is surely enhanced by the visual glories of autumn.  What artist would ever have painted a season of dying with such a vivid palette if nature had not done it first? Does death posses a beauty that we—who fear death, who find it ugly and obscene—cannot see? How shall we understand autumn’s testimony that death and elegance go hand in hand?

For me, the words that come closest to answering those questions are the words of Thomas Merton: “There is in all visible things a hidden wholeness.”  In the visible world of nature, a great truth is concealed in plain sight: diminishment and beauty, darkness and light, death and life are not opposites.  They are held together in the paradox of “hidden wholeness.”

Autumn constantly reminds me that my daily dyings are necessary precursors to new life.  If I try to “make” a life that defies the diminishments of autumn, the life I end up with will be artificial, at best, and utterly colorless as well.  But when I yield to the endless interplay of living and dying, dying and living, the life I am given will be real and colorful, fruitful and whole. 

Parker J. Palmer from the chapter “There Is a Season” within his book Let Your Life Speak (copyright 2000, John Wiley and Sons, Inc.)

A Day in the Country

Here's a piece I wrote seven years ago. I need to revisit this spot...

I took a couple of days off this week at a friend’s lovely retreat center, Lyric Springs, about forty miles outside of Nashville. Above the huge fireplace in the den, there is a placard that states “A day in the country is worth a month in the city.”

Many of the daylight hours were spent outside by the Little Harpeth River that runs along the property. There is a bend in the stream there, with a flood plain that is perhaps 250 yards long, and about fifty wide.

Some observations:

-A black and gold butterfly doing figure eight orbits around a cluster of magnolias.

-Squadrons of dark gray dragonflies with sky blue tails hovering then dispersing.

-The intoxicating scent of moss, damp foliage, and rushing water.

-Choruses of cicadas calling back and forth between groves of trees.

-Four legged water bugs of various classes skittering effortlessly across the glassy surface, creating concentric dimples.

-Twenty-foot vines dangling off the limestone overhangs swaying languidly.

-A caterpillar, no longer than ¼” aimlessly traversing the surface of a picnic table.

-Freshly burrowed snake holes—as many as nine in a couple of square yards.

-Who needs hallucinogenics when you can stare at the surge pool at the base of a rapid? The patterns are myriad, yet there is a living rhythm that is mesmerizing. Millions of surface bubbles created each instant, only to evaporate within seconds.

-Clusters of igneous and granite encased for millions of years in compressed shale shards.

-Delicate mushrooms with their almost flesh-like gills on the underside.

-A tiny black beetle slaking its thirst on a perfect globe of dew atop a blade of grass.

-Schools of minnows—in the hundreds—pulsing, darting, circling, and even transfixed as a separate, larger organic entity. Apparently not much room for individualism in their realm.

-At least a dozen different types of trees—some stout, others spiking ten stories or more.

-The sound of rushing liquid enveloping upon itself. It is so rich and textured—wholly unique and no metaphor can aptly describe. Suffice to say, it is the sound of life itself.

-A perfectly tendrilled ten inch hawk feather lying randomly in the grass.

-The wet crunch of damp soil, twigs, discarded bark, and gravel underfoot.

-Musk of blackened leaves in the finals stages of decomposition.

-Delicate strands of mossy water weed gently flapping in the underwater breeze of current.

-Sunlight streaming through the canopy of gently tussled leaves—the breeze and shimmering rays being the touches, the denouement as it were, to this symphony of creation.

-Even though I was the largest living thing, besides the trees, in this river bend ecosystem, I began to feel very, very small.

...and that’s a good thing.