Seasons of Time Blow Gently in Autumnal Breeze
By C. Austin
The billboard sign flashed by on the highway almost before I could
read it. "Festival of the Turning Leaves" - a quaint, albeit
descriptive, name. Somewhere close by a harvest festival was in the
planning. Some leaves are already turning and the summer wears thin.
A beautiful as the days have been, as endless the skies, time is
catching up.
The Celtic autumn arrived on August 1. The vernal equinox on
September 22 at 8:46 AM, PDT ushers in the midpoint between autumn and
winter's start on November 1.
On a morning not so long ago I stood in a breeze that swept between
spring and summer and marveled amidst hundreds of swirling maple and
ash seeds as they dashed by and beyond me.
The seeds that flew by me were so uncontained. Anyone watching
would have been struck by the random motion of the seeds, so much like
the seeming random events in our lives. But those maple seeds did not
dance for nothing, the ash seeds did not cloud the wind for show.
They, like us, are purposeful in their rotation, even if their full
trajectory is unseen. Their best attempts, like so many of ours, are
in pursuit of good ground.
It is fruitful, sometimes, to consider where the seeds of our own
lives were released, where they traveled and where they grew up.
Where did you come from? How is that place now? Was the ground you
found to put down roots more fertile than the place you left?
Seeds appear to fly without a frame, without structure. But they
are held to their course, as are we, by their own internal purpose.
They skirt this world and that, the past and the present, the spring
and the autumn. This year's seeds, next year's trees - rising in my
mind the same way the autumnal leaves now fly and scatter before me.
A festival of turning leaves also turns memories of seasons passed.
With the equinox comes balance. The sun illuminates half the
earth, from pole to pole with neither extremity tilted toward the sun.
In those rare moments of illuminated balance, sometimes we can
remember the seeds, sometimes we see only the trees. If we might,
just for a moment, hold the image of both, we might find the unique
dance of life that is ours alone. Celebration of the equinox is a
reverie to what is, what was, and what will always be between - may
the autumn breezes blow kindly on us all.
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