Fall Transitions

Friends,

It’s Labor Day weekend and, not surprisingly, I needed to close the window above my desk as a cool breeze wafted in to also remind me of the advent of fall. Yes, it’s time to put on our sweaters and fleece, but there are also a few more glorious late summer/early fall days to catch those last precious rays of sun. We can still enjoy harvesting our beans and tomatoes, gathering up bouquets of flowers, and preparing our gardens for winter. And soon we will be taking leaf-shuffling walks in the woods and joining nature’s wisdom to accept a kind of cyclic reality of the inevitable passing of time that fall offers. We squeeze out, like those last few dabs of toothpaste, any opportunities to enjoy the sun and the glories of the fall flowers and changing leaves.

Of all the seasonal and cultural transition markers during the year - January 1, the solstices and equinoxes, Memorial Day - Labor Day is  actually the most impactful in terms of affecting our daily routines and schedules. It can also be a time for some new beginnings and a kind of reset in our lives: our children advance a grade in school or we may assume new responsibilities at work or in our volunteer commitments, among others. We begin making plans for the holidays and brace for the election season in November. In any case, fall is a time to move forward and mature even as we also hold in our hearts all that is lost during the changes upon us. 

And the beginning of fall, when our hearts are more open and tender, is a time of melancholic reflection on our personal lives as well as the state of our families, communities, country and world. I am thinking especially about our grandchildren this evening. We had the opportunity to spend extended personal time with them this summer and marveled at their growing personas and social capacities they will now carry into their school year. In addition to being as present to them as possible when we visit, I am constantly also aware of wondering about who they may be becoming, and will become, in the face of such a fast-changing and ever-challenging world they are to inherit. When I ask what is my role to support them and their parents, the answer is always the same:  express and model unconditional love and encourage them to be who their seedling-of-self wants them to be. 

I am hoping for some major transitions in our political life this coming year, beginning with this fall. Given that our politics often feel so antithetical to the ethic of love, peace and justice, I yearn for signs of encouragement and hope, and I often do find them every day. But it is also good to be aware of the vulnerability of life, especially perhaps in the fall when our hearts are more open and tender to the precariousness of it all. But we must always hold the hope and expectation that nature models for us by taking a rest with the assurance of a spring resurrection of life, even as we also struggle to also do what is necessary and right to protect our selves and the natural world. I will close with a short poem from Wendell Berry, our beloved American agrarian philosopher, writer and poet, who died this week, that captures the essence of what I have been trying to say above.

Peace,
Tom 
_____________
A Song Sparrow Singing in the Fall

Somehow it has all
added up to song --
earth, air, rain and light,
the labor and the heat,
the mortality of the young.

I will go free of other
singing,
I will go
into the silence
of my songs, to hear
this song clearly. 

-Wendell Berry