The Mystery & Magic Of Autumn Leaves...
It’s interesting how some things become more captivating and vibrant with time...
How going away and coming back can refresh the eyes, so as to see the same places & sights as though it were the very first time...
I don’t recall having much anything of an appreciation for the autumn leaves when I was younger.
Having escaped to the tropics, where I could wear shorts & a t-shirt year round seemed the ultimate to me at the time. So when people would talk about their enjoyment of the seasons, I really didn’t get it.
Though I guess eventually, I matured.
The allure of tropical heat wore off as it dried me out. And leaving Bali after 5 years, I re-entered “reality” - complete with its four seasons to reacquaint myself with.
The first autumn back, I was taken aback by the beauty of the leaves.
It was kind of crazy... sure enough, I’d done something like 27 other years in Canada and obviously had seen the leaves turning colour before. But there was just this entirely new sense of vibrancy now.
I dunno if it was the contrast of having gone without the experience for 5 years, or all the activational work I’d done while away to open the senses, but it was really something else.
And now, the third year back...
I feel once again like its a whole new experience.
I don’t know if I’ve got some weird kind of amnesia where I forgot all the beauty I saw only a year ago, but again, it feels like I’m looking at the world through entirely new eyes when moving about through Vancouver, observing the most amazing palates of colours splashed upon the trees.
Did it take abandoning this most basic experience of nature, bouncing over to an opposite extreme, to develop an appreciation once back?
Is it merely a consequence of maturity, the evolving perspectives & values which inevitably bring a greater attention to such life’s treasured that were once ignored while younger and preoccupied with more flashy, exciting things and dreams?
I dunno. Maybe.
Whatever the case, it’s kinda weird.
Not just in this revived admiration for the beauty of the earth, but an odd sense of being so in the moment deeply with it as though it’d be the last time.
I know that could come across as strangely morbid. Though on the same token, perhaps realistic - considering how many years I’ve been through “the same” experience, yet not able to remember/connect with it, as though it was an entirely different lifetime ago. Maybe there’s some part of me that is dying, and it will be the last/only time I experience it - before the rebirth of the new me that’ll witness next year’s autumn transformations.
Or perhaps within the context of that perspective, there’s an element of such deep immersion into the phenomenon of nature, that experience is one of witnessing my own transformation - the old “all is one, you are the entire universe, everything is but an external projection of yourself, blah blah blah” stuff.
Or maybe somewhere in between... it’s like I’ve never seen this before, because I haven’t.
Because it’s millions of different leaves than last year, which are now on their deathbed - an entirely new generation of this small facet of nature’s life, which only sprung into existence months ago, during the spring. And as such, next year’s sight will be an entirely different generation of life that hasn’t even been born yet - thus, only comparable to this or any previous year’s sights on the most surface level.
And with that...
Is it I that is in transformation, opening up to see more detail, greater vividness, and increased clarity in these artist sights nature offers during this season... or might each new generation of the earth’s fruits (in this case, leaves), somehow be evolving to increase in its beauty, vibrancy, and allure...?
Who knows. Maybe a bit both.
(Or maybe it was just the LSD I took this morning. 😛)
I didn't appreciate it when I was younger like I do now. That is a total fact. I think it is something that comes with age. That is why you see color tours filled with mostly older retired people :) I have to believe Canada has some pretty vast expanses of awesome colors. That Agawa Canyon train tour in the fall is probably insane.
Hah, nice twist there at the end ;)
Wanted to share with you these words form a literary master, on the price and process of writing:
For the sake of Poetry
You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)—they are experiences.
For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning.
You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn’t pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else—); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quite, retrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars,—and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that.
You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the scattered noises.
And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important.
Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—only then can it happen that some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.
—Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Absolutely splendid photos @rok-sivante
Did you take them yourself?
No, these are just royalty-free ones from Unsplash