There's something about the change of seasons that is hopeful. The heat of late summer has lifted. Doors and windows stay open waiting for the evening chill. No matter what is happening--and there's enough happening today for lamentations to pierce the Heavens--Autumn still comes. For this we must be grateful. Our human sinfulness has not, so far please God, prevented summer, fall, winter or spring. The world keeps revolving. And here we are, in another October.
So easily this season gives rise to poetry. In 1902, in "Autumn Day," Rainer Marie Rilke wrote, "Lord: it is time. The summer was immense. / Lay your shadows upon the Sundial, / and in the meadows let the wind go free." This speaks to me. I have a sundial in my side yard that marks a death. I have a meadow where the wind goes free. Then the last stanza, "Whoever has no house now will not build one anymore. / Whoever is alone now will remain so for a long time." A melancholy premonition that we must ready for what comes next, we and the birds and chipmunks and all who fly south, burrow or grow winter coats for warmth.
The last lines tell a truth about war too. Here is where our lamentations lie. Palestinian citizens are being slaughtered in return for the slaughter of Israelis by Hamas. Children for children. An eye for an eye. Ukrainians are still suffering to defend their homeland and young Russians are being sent to kill or be killed. As fall turns to winter, "whoever has no house now will not build one anymore."
Even earlier, in 1820 John Keats called autumn, "Season of Mists and Mellow Fruitfulness," using sensuous imagery to describe its fleeting abundance. And isn't abundance always fleeting? Robert Frost wrote, "Nothing gold can stay." How briefly are the dogwoods red and the maples yellow? Their radiance falls to the ground and turns to mulch.
How is any of this hopeful, we might wonder, if we have not changed since Robert Burns wrote in 1784 that "Man's inhumanity to man / makes countless thousands mourn." How can hope live amongst historical rivalries and political chaos? Why do we find it in the turning of the earth?
maybe each new season reminds us that the earth abides. Maybe we relish that something is predictable. Something there is from which no one need run.
I fear the sentimentality of this thought, I who am not being slaughtered or evacuated. But surely moments of hope are good things. Surely, we need not be ashamed to appreciate fat mounded mums in russet and yellow or smiling pansy faces in purple and white. The colors of fall are exuberant for a reason. This October they might make one hope that death and destruction will not have the final say.
They might remind us that while we cannot be complacent or resigned, nor should we be without hope.
For as it is written, "Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises. The wind blows to the south and turns to the north; round and round it goes, ever returning on its course. All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full." Ecclesiastes 1:4
Nina Naomi
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