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September 23, 2002
Rising to the Occasion of Fall
Summer is spent, but what has it left us for Fall?To put a tortured year behind us, in favor of a tortuous future?
Nature’s indifference to our affairs is one of its corrective virtues, but the Land is not unaffected by our actions.
At least we will project our guilt upon its suffering.
The drought persists, infecting Autumn’s prospects. Stressed trees drop early leaves, and promise a scant harvest. Fall is a season of beauty, revealed beneath the Summer’s retreat, but it’s typically a dry time, so we must hope for Winter snows to salve the coming year.
In the meantime, things die, like the grasses; or bloom, like Goldenrods; or go to seed, like Sunflowers; or just go away, like the migrant birds now passing through. Change and repetition, all mixed up in the most multifaceted of seasons.
At twelve hours of day, and twelve of night, the Year is balanced.
Darkness may outpace the day now, but there is much to be seen, while the light lasts. A furtive Cuckoo, or a bold Blackburnian Warbler, flickering through the Meadow; Jewel Weed along the Loch, where the insect thrum mingles with the liquid voice of the stream; butterflies decorating the flowers that decorate the Conservatory Garden.
To know these things seems to me a good harvest.
A harvest of necessity.
I have maintained, on this page, that such engagement is in fact corrective, rather than escapist. We cannot escape our ties to Nature, any more than we can escape ourselves. Sometimes I want to escape from other people, but there is reassurance in finding how many of them are similarly motivated.
A year after last September’s terror and disaster, I met a woman who’d found healing through immersion in birding. We all need healing, if only from the basic trauma of existing. Birds can help, but people need to help each other. I sometimes feel that I should be more helpful and less insular, so it pleased me to be able to point out a few birds for this neophyte, including a rare Connecticut Warbler. Passing along something of what I’ve learned in my own endeavor has a way of validating the effort; laying healing upon healing; a gratification which cannot be had in the solitary precincts of meditation.
Her joy was palpable, and that made me feel good.
So, though Autumn brings decline, the cycle of the Year still offers hope. Healing comes from wholeness, just as our pain comes from separation. Each bird we learn is the answer to a want; each change of season completes the cycle once again; each point of contact holds the World intact.
September 2, 2002
Belabored
On Labor Day we rest.We are told that God rested, in the wake of Creation.
We are made in God’s image, and we too need respite from labors.
But work we must; for us, there is no standing still; no letting the timestream part around us; we have to work; we must exert, merely to exist.
And God?
The Gnostic among us will say that there is something telling in God’s need for rest; something belying the image of effortless omnipotence that attaches to deity.
If God were really God, rest would be unnecessary.
In fact, Creation, which is to say, effort, would be unnecessary.
The only thing God would have to do is to be, and that would be enough; that would be Plenty.
The encompassing, unmediated presence of God is the Plenitude.
We only hear about it as something rumored after death, but I don’t think it would be withheld, had God the power to deliver.
It can’t be granted, by God or to God; it must be worked for, and we are the tools through which the work is done.
Which pretty much means that we are the ones who have to do the work, with no more help from God than the basic grace of our existence.
So we labor.
For today, that we may take a day off, and for a future beyond effort, when the work is accomplished, and there is one eternal Holiday, when everything is right, and nothing more needs to happen.
That's going to take a lot of work.
Better rest up for it.