Of late I have been really struck by the enormous beauty of our city’s autumn leaves: trees with red leaves capping lower green leaves yet to turn, golden nugget leaves reflecting the sun and orange-brown leaves waiting their turn to flutter to the ground.
Brilliant hues against a grey sky or rich tones when the sky is, more occasionally now, so blue.
Pondering on this keen desire to soak up all autumn’s hues, the realisation has struck me that this longing has been stoked by the bleakness of the recent past.
March seems for me to mark a year since a pandemic began ravaging the world.
It still continues to do so in many other places including our near neighbours.
Stanley Horowitz has said that “winter is an etching, spring a water colour, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of it all”.
A ‘mosaic’ says it all as life’s bits and pieces, regular and irregular, continue to toss us around like tumbling leaves on a breezy day.
But as autumn leaves eventually settle to earth, embed and transform, and winter presses forward, we can hibernate inwards for a time and reflect on the different tinges that come – welcome and unwelcome – into our lives.
This can be a season to find contentment, wherever we are, by taking notice of what we have and are.
As spring and summer have nurtured our ‘trees’, now, like the shedding of leaves, we may find beauty in letting things, no longer needed, go.
Leaves are the last burn of autumn before the covering of winter dampens the flame for a time.
Thich Nhat Hanh writes about the falling leaf still being part of the tree as it falls because it returns to nourish the ground from which it came.
In shedding things no longer needed, we create space to, slowly and over time, welcome and nourish new growth – fragile green shoots that eventually and persistently issue forth from dull-grey woody sticks.
As the charm of autumn succumbs to the contrasting beauty of winter, may an ancient Irish blessing give us pause for thought:
“May the blessings of light be upon you,
Light without and light within,
And in all your comings and goings,
May you ever have a kindly greeting
From them you meet along the road.”
