Speechytime

Autumn, come this week, is the deepest of seasons for me.

Seasons have feelings. Winter is sleep and death. Spring joyous new life. Summer has the thrumming beat of our lives.

And Autumn is melancholy.

We revel in Autumn's sublime defeat into winter not because we find the same melancholy in ourselves as we also collapse after a summer of life, but in that we find that which in ourselves that could be destroyed, slowly, by decay, and find ourselves continuing through it, in spite of it, so that we pass through the season not as participators, but as observers.

It is the transition from life to death, if we take the seasons Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter to be Birth, Life, Dying, and Death. We experience Birth too quickly, and Life is rarely participated in fully by most people. Reflection leads to inevitabilities, to death. And so we experience our future by proxy in Autumn, preparing, and living out, the one long decline that we are all participating in.