Discover how this transitional season can
reveal both the abundance and
the limitations of our
everyday lives.
Autumn, with all its traditional images of
colorful trees, frost-covered pumpkins, and piles of wood
stored up against winter’s cold, can be a season filled
with anticipation. The harvest, the imminent onset of cold and
snow, the resumption of old routines, and the beginning of the
school year all require preparation and planning. If summer has
been something of a pause, autumn helps us to see the passage
of time more clearly.
Autumn is a season of fruition and
reaping, of thanksgiving and celebration of abundance and
goodness of the earth. But it is also a season that starkly and
realistically encourages us to see our own limitations.
Warm and stirring pieces by E. B. White,
Anne Lamott, P. D. James, Julian of Norwich, May Sarton, Kimiko
Hahn, and many others in this beautiful book rejoice in autumn
as a time of preparation and reflection, when the results of
hard labor are ripe for harvest.
“Stellar.”
— Church & Synagogue Library Association Newsletter
From Autumn: A
Spiritual Biography of the Season
I have been walking in the woods, and have
lain down on the ground to rest. It is the middle of October,
and around me, all through the woods, the leaves are quietly
sifting down. The newly fallen leaves make a dry, comfortable
bed, and I lie easy, coming to rest within myself as I seem to
do nowadays only when I am in the woods .… We must
recover the sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability
to be worshipful in its presence.
—Wendell Berry
Thursday, November 13th
I realized that I am not afraid of dying,
but what made me feel awful was what a mess it will be when I
do, and what a lot of work involved for those who will have to
take care of things here. I felt, "I simply cannot die and
leave all this to be taken care of!"
It was wonderful to come back here day
before yesterday to the shining dark blue sea, to the wide arc
of the ocean, now that the leaves have gone.
—May Sarton
It breaks your heart. It is designed to
break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when
everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer,
filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the
chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall
alone…. Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken
branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped,
and summer was gone.
—A. Bartlett Giamatti
