I thought it was the light, for a long while I thought this. The quality of it, the angle it comes and spreads itself across this tiny part of this giant planet. Maybe it’s the light, I would think and rethink and wonder about for years and years. Had to be the light.
Now I think it’s the air, and if not instead of, perhaps in addition to. It’s the crispness, something Gatsby thought as well, through Fitzgerald’s unique and stunning point of view. Maybe it’s both that begins us again each year, each lap around the sun, each transition into what we know as Autumn. We begin again, and the strange sunlight streaming through branches with dying leaves, this half angle between Summer and Winter Solstice, only seems to lend magic to the rebirth, to the transformation we all endure.
How bizarre this new beginning so near the ending that Winter ushers in, that we begin so soon before we must hide away and cocoon ourselves in warmth to survive the cold that Autumn’s crispness only hints at. I wonder, sitting here with window open and the smell that comes just before the scent of decay begins permeating all things at the edge of a forest, and I wonder often:
Are we the only creatures that so acutely feel this life begin again in the Autumn?
Spring is the season of rebirth in the animal kingdom, so too in the world of all things green and growing, but we do not feel the same. At least not all of us, at least not me. I’ve written of this many times, here, in poetry, and one is attached below that sings the lyrics to this nostalgic song, and I don’t know that I’ll ever understand the magnetic pull from my soul to this fragile and faltering season. I don’t know that I need to, in the end, I just know the crispness returns to the air and I feel electrified whilst simultaneously feeling a denseness to my being that is so profound it affects the gravity I’ve never been immune to. I’m heavier, pulled too to the center of the earth—maybe this is where the magnet rests.
A million perhaps shape the reasons for this, a million could bes, as we throw explanation at the school year beginning this time of year for the first 18 years of our lives, we speak of adolescence and the shaping of the people we will one day become, but it all feels too hollow, it all feels too flat. I ask questions of the universe that I don’t know the answers to, I ask if those in the Southern Hemisphere feel this same melancholy, but only in Springtime, as their seasons are our seasons, only flipped. Does September come and bring with it new growth, new birth, and do these memories coincide with this feeling of their own soul’s regeneration, as ours do with falling leaves and chimney smoke and the smell of pumpkins rotting on doorstops at the tail end of October? I know not, and I know I need not know.
I am pulled to it, and while the warming of our global has prolonged the Summer that precedes it, I know each year that Autumn will come, that it will spread its fingers, skeletal and almost icy, and when it does I will be left sitting on porch with eyes closed and head slightly back, I will be inhaling the cool, wet air, and I will be remembering.
A lifetime of new starts, a lifetime of Autumns, a lifetime of invitations from a universe more benevolent than we’d ever believe, if only we stopped trying so hard to control it.
I am drowning in my memories of this life, of this season, of so many days I stared out at a world that was changing, preparing for the hibernation and eventual burst of color again, and felt the shifting of time, the shifting of myself. I called it seismic, I call it so still.
I always will.
Autumn memories,
the crisp air inviting us
to begin again.
In Autumn, We Begin Again | 9.8.24