Autumn: A Reflection On Spring

Now that Spring has made an appearance in the Southern Hemisphere, I thought I'd tell you about my favourite season: Autumn.

There is much about Autumn that makes it my favourite time of year. The softness of the weather, the calm quietude of the evenings, the lingering twilights, the crisp mornings scented with dew. There's a freshness about Autumn, a real lightness of being after the enervating heat of Summer that just makes you glad to be alive.

But there's one thing in particular about Autumn that moves me deeply and makes it my favourite time of year. As a season, it has a profoundness that touches the deepest chords of our humanity: it speaks to our mortality, to our transience: and yet at the same time it is heart-rendingly stirring, touching on the terrible beauty of being in such a way as to fill the soul with a deeply-rooted hope and serenity.

It happens on a particular kind of day in Autumn. The kind of day in which the sky is clear and so brightly blue it makes the eyes ache; a day filled with a softly luminescent light, the kind of glassy light you get when you're swimming in a clear pool or a river and you look up and see the sun. Yet at the same time, there's a crisp edge to the air, a faint chill that is at once refreshing and a harbinger of approaching Winter. You feel invigorated; and yet you are also reminded of the cold that is just around the corner.

On days like this, in the central business district, as the long afternoons drift languidly by, the tops of skyscrapers are picked out by the slanting shafts of light, shards of glistening radiance sparking off the windows. The buildings look like starships made of light, like luminous alien vessels, their noses pointed skyward toward the stars. Yet, at ground level, all is in shadow: the streets are caverns; canyons and arroyos of shadows and creeping darkness. And it is cold in those shadows; the warmth of the setting sun doesn't reach down to where the people are making their way home at the end of another working day.

I think of this phenomenon as a kind of metaphor for life. Augustine of Hippo, one of the great Fathers of the early church, wrote: You made us for Yourself, oh Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their ease in You. Two thousand years later, Bruce Springsteen sang: Everybody needs a place to rest, everybody needs a place called home; don't make no difference what nobody says, ain't nobody likes to be alone. Similarly, Carson McCullers wrote a book titled The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. It is one of the verities of being that humans are born with Springsteen's Hungry Heart, with the desire to find a meaning and purpose to our lives, to somehow cheat death by becoming more than the sum (and limitation) of our mortality. We live in the shadows, and stretch our hands out toward the sunlight; of course, we don't get there, but I think it one of the genii of our species that we are endlessly inventive in the ways in which we try to achieve the objective. That, and our persistence.

And that's why Autumn is so moving and special and poignant for me; because it speaks to our mortality, to the sadness of the universe, and to the hope and joy that are the surprising gifts of the bitter-sweetness of being. We walk the shadowed canyons of our existence; but we can look up and see the sunlight glinting off the tops of life's skyscrapers, and know there is warmth and light, even if not necessarily for us, in this mode of being. By association, we take heart and know peace. From the pathos comes the purpose - and the hope that the light we perceive but cannot attain is merely the precursor to a greater Light whose radiance encompasses us all.

Talk to you soon,

BB

Quote for the Day: Autumn is a second Spring where every leaf is a flower. (Albert Camus)