(4)

Autumn's rushing by.  So quickly, too quickly, the days have grown short – the weeks seem to fly.  The trees blaze up in a fury of color; red and orange and yellow leaves, buffeted by the wind, scatter.  Chipmunks and squirrels race about at a furious pace; flocks of screeching birds, gathering for migration, wheel round and round a sky of tattered blue.  In the morning, the grass is limned with frost; the last of the fall flowers turn stiff and brittle under its icy touch.  Some days it rains from dawn till dusk, a thin, cold rain that feels sharp as needles against the skin; other days a fine, chill mist hangs in the air.  People begin to talk of snow.  They can feel winter closing in.

I walk to the cemetery as often as I can now, the better to enjoy the sights and sounds and smells of autumn, my favorite season.  But I cannot sit beneath any tree, as the ground is too cold; nor even stand in one place for very long.  Autumn will not let me linger:  I too must hurry!  As I walk about I feel one moment as wary and guarded as any animal; the next moment I'm adrift in the rapture of my senses.  The pulse of life quickens within me; loosens its grip; quickens again.  Now I feel the energies of the life-force contract to a pinpoint of focused awareness; now that energy dilates, and I am not I but a loosely connected collection of sensate impressions, a ball of energy with no specific center.  What I begin to realize is that by this rise and fall in the pitch of energy within me, by the dilation and contraction of its focus, the individuation of the life-force that "I" am gains movement and momentum.  This is the volition not of psychology, but of an energetic manifestation; and this energetic manifestation, operating under its own laws of cause and effect, is that which constitutes the true me.

Is it possible that I can learn how to control its movement?  Can I overleap my psychological self in such a way as to learn the methods of energetic manipulation?  Or is it just that this energetic manifestation taken this particular form, this particular psychological shape, for some reason that I do not yet comprehend?

What is my purpose?  Where lies my destiny?

Autumn is waning already; it's rushing by, fleeing, all in a hurry.  Autumn is the season of dying; autumn is the season of my birth.  My birthday, as it happens, comes just at the beginning of those few brief weeks when, in this part of the country at least, the trees are most vivid with color.  A week after my birthday I stood, one afternoon while at the cemetery, under a maple tree whose leaves had become a wavering, shimmering mass of bright yellow, lit brighter still by the sun shining through them.  I stood looking up into that brightness, that blaze of light, and I thought:  Could it be that this is all that dying means?  Is it just another turn of the wheel, another step in the dance?  Could it be that dying too has its moment of sensual pleasure, of celebratory joy?

A hard wind blew, and a shower of yellow fell all about me.  I spun slowly round, watching the leaves fall.  And then I stopped, staring at the leaves as they lay on the grass, gently lifting and settling again in the autumn breeze:  and I knew that I had been given my answer.

I understood the message that autumn's brief beauty brings.

LISTEN, LISTEN