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Autumn's rushing by.  The days have grown short and the weeks seem to fly.  The trees blaze up in a fury of color and the wind's all in a hurry to do its work, scattering red and orange and yellow leaves everywhere it goes.  Chipmunks and squirrels race about at a furious pace.  Flocks of screeching birds wheel round and round in 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 all the day long, 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 – 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.  And what I begin to realize is that it is by this rise and fall in the pitch of energy within me, by the dilation and contraction of its focus, that the individuation of the life-force that "I" am gains its 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 motion, is what 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 has 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, 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 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 it.  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 in the play of energy?

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 lightly on the grass, 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 beauty brings.

LISTEN, LISTEN