Embracing Autumn

As the late-afternoon light peeks through golden branches, I feel my heart lilt like an old song while I sit on my front porch cradling a mug of pumpkin-spice latte. I am in my element because autumn is my favorite time of year. It has always been, and there will be no changing that deep truth. Of course, I am blessed to live in a part of the world where fall is truly spectacular. Trees that were once the purest green explode into the most scintillating hues of gold, red, and orange in East Tennessee, and they linger long enough to make me wish they could stay forever. Tilting my head upward to view the tallest branches splashed like brushstrokes against the blue-sky canvas, I feel my breath catch. I feel more at home in the world now than at any other time of the year.

Perhaps there are many reasons for that extra bounce in my step this time of year. For one, after the intense heat of the summer, the crisp breezes of September and October flow through raised windows, ajar like apertures open all the way to heaven. As the harvest-scented air nips the skin under a sun that is gentler and kinder than in any other season, it’s a joy to walk swathed in chunky sweaters and warm boots into the woods.

Fall is also a time of gratitude. Not solely reserved for the day of Thanksgiving, this season, with its dying leaves and waning days of light, beckons us toward remembrance. Something melancholic is written in the leaves, some tragic truth that we are all transient beings, and it is perhaps this reminder that evokes a grander sense of gratefulness than we experience most other times of the year. As I have written in my poem “Language of the Hill Folk,” those souls who stay close to the earth are especially the ones who are most quickly brought to the beautiful silence of thanksgiving: “Then we listen mutely in calm wonder, / pausing at this blessed ingathering, / felled by fall, stilled by gratitude.”

This feeling of being “felled by fall,” more than anything, makes me want to put my feet on a trail. Perhaps some deep Celtic longing coded upon a genetic strand pulls me toward the forest this time of year. In the deep recesses of the woods, I see change swaying in the breeze, and this reminds me that there are also transitions that are happening within me—have happened, will happen. And in all of us. We are called toward change. My forthcoming poetry collection contains several poems that mirror this truth.

In honor of autumn, I share a poem from Trailing the Azimuth.

Passages

Transitions in life fall upon us

like the amber and ruby leaves

emerging on altered trees

in an autumn woodland—

not part of awareness at first,

though slowly turning daily

toward a deep transformation,

awaiting the sudden

jolt of recognition

as the wayfarer looks upward

to the calico ridgeline

and sees the trail of change,

exhorting a new season of life.

Summer’s soul underlies it all,

this remembrance of newness,

as the grace of undying light

that falls upon dying leaves

makes them still appear as full

as the large lemons of Naples

or a decanter of limoncello—

liquid gold, endless shine—

discovered as a dram on trees

in an afternoon walk in the sun

that yields unexpected wonder

and acceptance of the cycles

of life that transfigure us all.