SEASON OF MISTS, LAMENTATION AND HOPE

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

 

GLOBAL SADNESS FOR OUR UKRAINIAN NEIGHBORS

More sadness now, global and at the hands of Vladimir Putin.  It seems inappropriate to talk about all those lovely, simple, ordinary and mindful things we do each day to nurture ourselves and others, when Ukrainians are hiding in subway tunnels and lining up at checkpoints to enter neighboring countries as refugees. They are running for their lives.

I read Putin's speech justifying his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The transcript is online at Bloomberg.com and elsewhere.  It is a speech, as historians know far better than I, that echoes Hitler in the 1930s.  Analysts call Putin's speech "bizarre" and "irrational." He is a last-century man avenging a past that began with the fall of the USSR,  and creating a victimhood for his country beyond which he cannot see. The speech reflects a paranoid fear of the West and NATO.  The result in real terms, so far, is a powerful country crushing a smaller sovereign nation. People are dying. 

So much, this reminds me of the annexation of Austria by Germany on March 15, 1938, just this time of year. My mother was a historian who studied under Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg of Austria after his exile to America.  She talked often of those times.  President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine has refused offers of exile.  If the world needed a hero, this brave Ukrainian Jew is he.  

So, we will watch and pray and vote and some of us (younger and better than I) will be activists, while governments sanction and vigils are being held and protests against Putin's War all over the world, and in Russia as well.  And Ukrainians will defend their homes and cities.  And we will admit that there is evil in the world and that all is not well.  We don't know what is to come.

Dear God, help the world find peace.  In the name of the Gods of every nation, time and place.  Amen.