The sultry charm of autumn

 

Why should one’s soul be in love just with the spring? All seasons have their unique offerings. Look at the lovely autumnal surrender. The trees shedding the extras for a walk through the cold winters. The fallen leaves must be murmuring a lot. Listen to their story.

These are old leaves rich with age, gladly abandoning their hold on the branches and falling down with the cool breeze. This is a beautiful version of what we call death, but which is just a transformation in the eternal cycle.

Autumn is basically a collective phenomenon of detachment. Stand in the mist of such mass-scale leafy drops; detachment almost raining with the leaves. Make the most of it; listen to their murmuring rustle of joyfully quitting the stage of life.

And when they quit life with such a soothing rustling song, it shows how fully they have lived.

The fuller the life, the less scary is death. Death then doesn’t appear like an abstract entity, something cut off from life. It then appears like life is shifting to a new level, a new dimension. It then gives a glimpse of a continuity, not something like a dead end.

Videos and thoughts can’t catch such a phenomenal experience. It’s like we try to catch air in our fist by clenching our fingers and it slips out. But open the hand and it’s embraced by the all-encompassing presence of air around. These are the moments when we are totally open with our vulnerability and innocence—like the open hand—and are embraced by a larger presence, undefined and unbound, which hands over a portion of its freedom to us and we feel joyful.

My slice of autumn has a flowery color to it in my yard. There is a flowery drizzle in place of falling leaves. I have collected a huge pile on my table. This is just a portion of the flowers that drizzle in a flowery, scented rain from the two parijat trees in the yard. Scented, dewy, flowery nights; and the rain of flowers in the cool mornings. With so many flowers around, no wonder I find my spirit dancing, intoxicated with the beauty of the countless blooms and the scented breeze.