Fall
has always been my favorite season.
The time when everything bursts with its last beauty,
as if nature had been saving up all year for the grand finale.
The time when everything bursts with its last beauty,
as if nature had been saving up all year for the grand finale.
~
Lauren DeStefano, Wither
The Harvester Island
Wilderness Workshop was incredible. I
went to write with 11 strangers, and I left with 15 new friends. In the coming weeks, I’ll be posting my
photos and thoughts on the workshop and on the beauties of Kodiak, Alaska.
|
H
|
appy New
Year! L’Shana Tovah!
Autumn is often
seen as a time of death and decay ~ leaves falling, ground hardening, summer’s
harvest withering. And, yes ~ all that is happening.
But if we
stop there, we’ve only read Autumn’s flap copy.*
Our
societal myopia of focusing almost exclusively on the surface, the first
impression image, extends to our perception of the seasons. Signs of negative change ~ the brown grass,
the fading sun, the gradually colder weather ~ become all we see while we
forget that all that decay on top seeps underground and feeds the seeds and
beneficial bugs for next Spring’s buds and blooms.
 |
| Autumn Leaves and Apples © Igor Yaruta |
Maybe I am
in a privileged minority, but I have always thought that the new year should
begin in Autumn, and the images the word conjures are as far from death and
decay as fresh apple cider is from hard cider.
Explosion
of colour
Pumpkins
Reading by
the fire
Wool
blankets
Flannel
shirts
Apple
cider
Gingerbread
Constant
Comment tea
Reciting
poetry in an ancient graveyard
Autumn is
a time of ripening, harvesting, cider pressing, storing up for the coming
winter. It is a season of celebration of
life, not a time of sadness and mourning the end of summer.
So grab an apple, dip it in caramel,
and join me amoung the worn gravestones.
To Autumn
William Blake
O Autumn,
laden with fruit, and stain’d
With the
blood of the grape, pass not, but sit
Beneath my
shady roof; there thou may’st rest,
And tune
thy jolly voice to my fresh pipe,
And all
the daughters of the year shall dance!
Sing now
the lusty song of fruits and flowers.
The narrow
bud opens her beauties to
The sun,
and love runs in her thrilling veins;
Blossoms
hang round the brows of Morning, and
Flourish
down the bright cheek of modest Eve,
Till
clust’ring Summer breaks forth into singing,
And
feather’d clouds strew flowers round her head.
The
spirits of the air live in the smells
Of fruit;
and Joy, with pinions light, roves round
The
gardens, or sits singing in the trees.”
Thus sang
the jolly Autumn as he sat,
Then rose,
girded himself, and o’er the bleak
Hills fled
from our sight; but left his golden load.
Oremus pro invicem,
~
Mikaela
*Flap copy is the term used for the book synopsis on the inside of a dust jacket.
