What I Love About Fall

The season that energizes in so many ways, causing among other things one to be introspective and uplifted. While spring is nice too, there's something extra special about autumn. The crispness of the air has a quality all its own that speaks to the soul. There's something brutally honest about the bare trees and a cold, stark atmosphere. This is reality personified. Everything pauses and becomes silent for a moment in time. Listen to the absence of sound, how it pierces the inner being. What does the unheard speak of? All the world is unhinged for a season.

Much more elegant to come in from the cold to feel cozy than to be hot in the summer and turn on coldness. Nothing against the summer, though, because it merely prepares us for wondrous fall.

Winter, spring, summer or fall
All you got to do is call
And I'll be there...
You've got a friend

It all culminates with the fall. James knows the pattern well.

George Eliot knew it too. "Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns."

The leaves take on a metamorphosis, altering their panoply of colors, before mercifully fluttering downward to return to mother earth, leaving tree branches empty and waiting for a new beginning.

Perhaps if we had the fall all year round, we wouldn't realize its splendor as much. We need to see what fall isn't like so that we can appreciate what it is like. What does that tell you about life? Can you make it from one autumn to the next?

Stanley Horowitz may have best captured the essence of the build-up of seasons...
"Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all."

What a sublime thought... It all comes together in the fall. A welcome resolution to the long year's journey.

The poets and authors are the dreamers who mold life best, knowing the majestic in the air...

"No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace, As I have seen in one autumnal face." Rave on, John Donne, rave on.

My sorrow, when she's here with me,

Thinks these dark days of autumn rain

Are beautiful as days can be;

She loves the bare, the withered tree,
She walks the sodden pasture lane.

—Robert Frost

And Frost intones that fall is apropos for assuaging the melancholy heart as well, a deep backdrop to bring the stolid monochrome back into its glory, yet ever so slowly at a thoughtful autumn pace.

There is a harmony in autumn, and a lustre in its sky, Which through the summer is not heard or seen, As if it could not be, as if it had not been!
—Percy Bysshe Shelley

Shelley speaks of harmony and luster, those almost indescribable qualities that must be experienced to be understood. The qualities other seasons know nothing of.

And so let us collectively inhale the magnificence of this autumnal period we now have before us, a blessing from the skies, a delicate feast for the ears and eyes. Let it fill your nostrils with newness of life. Let it seep in, let its beauty transform you.

Autumn, the year's last, loveliest smile.

—William Cullen Bryant

How do I love thee, o fall? I shall count the ways all the day long...