Autumn is that season in between: not summer, though still somewhat like summer, and not winter, though still somewhat like winter. It is the season that grabs the attention of the moment as we take up our schedules again. A season of brilliant October leaves and drab November branches, of yellow warm days and cold crystal nights, of blankets around the knees at high school football games, of lovely long shadows of the orange sun at dusk, the smell of dry leaves in the air and the smoke of their burning. There are pumpkins and the delightful frights of Halloween and Vs of Canada geese honking raucously overhead. There are the cold rains taking down the last of the leaves, the snow shovels to find just in case, and shorter days with darker mornings as harbingers of winter’s beckoning.
Autumn is a season that teaches us that our lives are made not to run in smooth and easy paths, predictable and even, always known. Our lives are messy, sometimes scheduled, sometimes random, sometimes prepared for, sometimes taken on the fly as we juggle our own blazing experiences, all of which come at us with their contradictions and with their own joys and sorrows. And it is the season that reminds us that maybe we are not our own; we neither mark out nor control all the paths we may take. And like all the seasons, autumn teaches us that beginnings and fulfillment and endings are not negotiable - they are part of the cycle of our experience in this world, the stuff of our daily life. But our responses to changes, renewals, endings, and the confusing mix of day-to-day moments - this is the stuff of our spiritual life. Autumn asks us to grapple with this truth that we in North America are often so eager to avoid: that life carries with it a particular uncertainty and that our quest to find the means to live with that knowledge is, at its deepest, a spiritual quest.
-Marc
