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.)
No comments:
Post a Comment