Autumn

Posted on September 1, 2016

“Hapgood Pond.” By U.S. Department of Agriculture [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

It’s a melancholy season. The days get shorter, the nights longer, which is catnip for depression. Some people love the colors, the piles of orange and yellow leaves, but I look at them and all I see is death. These things, once alive, are now dead. Living through autumn means watching the world die around you.

Not permanently, of course. We know that it’s part of a cycle, that the death we witness today paves the way for life to burst forth again in the spring. But autumn is when the joy of that rebirth is farthest away. Months of darkness and cold stand between us and it.

Autumn is a time for wariness, for the sloughing-off of pretensions. A time to prepare for a long march.