Autumn at Dancing Water
"I like spring, but it is too young. I like summer, but it is too proud. So I like best of all autumn, because its leaves are a little yellow, its tone mellower, its colours richer, and it is tinged a little with sorrow and a premonition of death. Its golden richness speaks not of the innocence of spring, nor of the power of summer, but of the mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age. It knows the limitations of life and is content. From a knowledge of those limitations and its richness of experience emerges a symphony of colours, richer than all, its green speaking of life and strength, its orange speaking of golden content and its purple of resignation and death."
~ Lin Yutang, Chinese inventor, linguist, novelist, philosopher, and translator [found in a recent James Clear 3-2-1 newsletter ~ check it out here]
Autumn and I have a complicated relationship. I love her and she scares me.
I love spending time with her exuberance, honesty and courage. I love her bold, vibrant outfits and her slow 3-month strip tease. I love her unpredictability: that she is crisp and cool and rainy and sunny and dry and windy and unapologetically all the things.
And at the same time, her darkness encroaches. As beautiful and amazing as she is, she makes me look at uncomfortable inescapable truths. Like aging and endings and impermanence and death. She challenges me to face it all. Sometimes when I’m with her my heart hurts.
This morning I walked in the crisp, cold, green, golden, orange, purple autumn woods. As I breathed her in, I felt more than anything her aliveness even as I know she is dying.
Autumn and I feel intimately connected this year. The colors, the energy and the “mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age.”
Autumn at Walnut Creek Park in Albemarle County Virginia
Ah. Yes. There it is. She and I are at the same time of life.
I feel a sisterhood with Autumn and like human sisterhoods, that can be complex. I think she is amazing and inspiring … and I feel trepidation and resistance about the mirror she holds up to me.
For my walk in Autumn tomorrow, I might wear green or gold or purple…or all three. As I breathe in the sunshine and shade, the chill and the heat, I’ll see if I can step into everything she invites.