Autumnal lights: A reflection
Choosing to slow
Thank you to Ty, who writes Sitting Queerly and Reading Photographs here on Substack, for this perfect photo to accompany this reflection…
Green to Yellow
Autumn has always been the time of year that brings a flood of sense memories to me from childhood. The crunch beneath the feet. Shuffling the stride to kick leaves into a cloud surrounding my legs. The smell of decay with a hint of sweet. Hawking mums in the church parking lot to pay for cub scout camping weekends. Jumping into a pile of leaves and coming out baptized. A cool breeze sending the thick, humid air back to the gulf in a matter of minutes, leaving me in need of a sweater. A picture of my mother lying on her stomach in the autumnal outside, head propped on her hands, eyes staring back through late 80’s glasses (the ones where the temple bar connects to the frame at the bottom).
As a kid, I relished this season and its Saturday soccer games, leaf piles, and colorful views. I can’t explain why this season has personally always felt so poignant. There was something embedded in it that just felt right.
What I don’t remember from those childhood years is the seasonal transition from the bustle of early autumn to the slowdown of late. As a kid, Autumn represented the time to accelerate into studies, sports, music and a thousand other tantalizing things. The prior season, summer, was the time to slow…for lounging, sleeping in, exploring with friends, and vacation. The break from school felt like a pressure release valve was held open. Now, my childhood is more than fifty percent of my years behind me and summer break is a thing of the distant past. So when the autumnal smells and sounds and sights begin, I feel an arresting pull not designed by a district calendar, but by evolutionary code within me.
As the days begin to shorten, squirrels scurry frantically for nuts in the black walnut trees and seeds in the dogwood branches, hoarding sustenance to see them through the no grow months of winter. The bustling skies are slowly abandoned as birds board their flights to the tropics. Agriculture shifts from provision to rest. Perhaps we are meant to follow suit by slowing our own production and settling into a period of quiet and reflection.
Embracing this is countercultural, as we hear our societal message to push, to produce, and to never stop. There is virtue in the tenacity of pursuit, in producing goods and services for the betterment of society, and indeed society has been changed for the better by many resilient, hard-working people. But at some point, unbridled ambition becomes tedious and ignores the limits that nature has placed on its participants. Listening to the rhythms of nature is to acknowledge that we are creatures of nature and to embrace these rhythms is to participate in our lives in a more whole way.
Orange
Seasonal change is an example of how we are meant to operate, but not a hard and fast rule that we must slow down when the calendar turns a particular page.
One of the blessings of living in the modern era is that our lives are no longer fully dictated by the seasons. Our grocery system provides consistent nutrition all year long, and electricity, heat, and internet give us the ability to work when we need. We are provided more opportunities than any other time in history to operate in a way that makes sense to not only our individual designs and preferences, but to our own stage in life and the varying needs we have to provide for others. It is our privilege to claim when we are in a season that requires extra effort or identify we are in a season that offers additional resources and security that will benefit us for a long time, if we only pursue it.
The challenge that faces us now is we have the choice to work practically every minute of every day of every year. With the financial incentives of our economic systems, many of us do just that. Let’s recognize the gift to produce when we need, but to also claim a more personal incentive that can be received when we prioritize a personal season of slow, enjoying and sharing the resources that we have accumulated, and even whittling them down, trusting that a time to refill the coffers will appear again.
Red
Autumn is a stunning visual of vibrant color on the backdrop of a blue sky. To soak in that beauty while it lasts provides an emotional charge for the bland and dark to come. As the season progresses, color dwindles, eventually spreading itself on the earth, pulling our human view down and inward. This is when the opportunity for vulnerability begins.
As what was vibrant externally is extinguished and we open to the sense of pause that begins as winter approaches, those that pause alongside can open to the vibrancy inside themself. Rest and silence are portals to the inner world. Each tree that stands bare is a picture of how we can stand during these times of silence. There is a part of us always exposed to the world, like the trunk base of a tree that is always visible, but the finer details of the narrowing trunks, twisted limbs and interwoven branches are only seen in intricate detail when not hidden by foliage. To know yourself takes patience and focused attention. Tracing your view from your trunk up each limb and along every branch is an adventure that will never be done as there are an infinite number of paths you could take among the intertwined sticks of yourself, and every new piece of knowledge brought forward into your consciousness is a new piece of you to love.
To be fully honest with ourselves, we must also acknowledge that no one will escape life unscathed. We all are eventually forced into a season where the soul will be bared / as every garment / floats to the earth. Embracing the seasonality of life to rest and reflect in times where we have the choice helps prepare us for the times when we are forced into a season of pause through circumstances outside of our control.
Final thought
I am in a long season of providing. I have three teenagers who need a father and who create expenses that require me to work full-time, throughout the full year. As much as I would love a three-month sabbatical, the career I am in today and the needs of my family mean that won’t happen any time soon, at least on the surface. However, I can enter an inner sabbatical as I go about my life of loving my children and working to provide. Over the next few months, I plan to embrace this personal season of slowing and shedding alongside the natural season. Throughout everyday moments, I will sit and meditate more often, and I will journal with an exposed honesty that allows me to open more fully to my inner world. Winter is near and I will bare my soul to myself so I can emerge with new knowledge of who I am come Spring.
What season do you stand in? Where do you find patterns of rest?
May you see beauty in the color and the bare…
Brian
If you missed the original “A Poem” post of Autumnal lights, I hope you will read and enjoy! You can find it here.
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Brian, I agree with you. Winter is challenging, and also healing. It’s like an x-ray of our lives, isn’t it? A time to see life in a simple, skeletal way—unembellished. Beautiful just as it is. I hear your willingness to live in the vivid present. I hope you’ll intentionally feel the cold outside—and then notice the warmth that comes from the inside. It’s your own earnest, warm heart. Thanks always for this honest reflection. May your winter sabbatical be restful and illuminating for you.
I really like this observation re: Autumn and the quiet and reflection because "Embracing this is countercultural, as we hear our societal message to push, to produce, and to never stop."