The Name of it is Autumn

"Beacon on Black Lake" by Steven Daluz

 Steven Daluz Website

 The name-- of it-- is "Autumn"--

The hue-- of it-- is Blood--

An Artery-- upon the Hill--

A Vein-- along the Road--

Great Globules-- in the Alleys--

And Oh, the Shower of Stain--

When Winds--upset the Basin--

And spill the Scarlet Rain--

It sprinkles Bonnets-- far below--

It gathers ruddy Pools--

Then-- eddies like a Rose-- away--

Upon Vermillion Wheels--

-Emily Dickinson

photo from MIT museum, Boston, MA, Sept. 2012

 

 

 

 

What a chill, wettish fall day does to one’s will to complete the everyday tasks!!  Mounds of dishes may abound in the sink, laundry may lie on the floor unsorted, work of all sorts and sundry may await at every doorpost, glaring ferociously… and still, what one wants is a cup of tea and a good book.  Or even to start a new project- blogging, designing works of art, writing poetry, whatever a person’s particular creative vent may be- or all of them!   

On an indoor-sy sort of day when the weather triggers the restless and mysterious impulses in us, away from the humdrum and toward the intangible, whether we front an adventure face-forward by pulling on our boots and coats and striding out into the rain, or whether we escape into adventures of our own imaginative creation, we dig out our souls and dust them off, remembering the extravagant grace, the divine touch, which makes us human.  

A bit of the vagabond comes out in me.  On such days I am likely to prate on about not being tied down, and owning too many things, and an urge to burn down a house and run off.  (I don’t ever really have the urge to arson, just the urge to be rid of everything I own; however, I am fond of exagerration.  It is a venerable tradition in the heritage of English literature).

On such days I envy cats.  Mind you, I don’t like them; I just envy them.  I’m too much of a kind with them, I think, to really like them.  They are fond of being worshiped; so am I, and there isn’t room for more than one goddess in a household.  But not to dwell on cats: still, on days like this, I wish I could “walk by my wild lone, and wave my wild tail” like they do.  

Autumn is the responsible party when it comes to referrals to burning down the house, though.  What a season!  Such blazes of wild, living, rippling color!  The sugar maples look like someone set a torch to them, particularly during the evening light just at sunset.  And Someone has touched a torch to my soul, too; inside a body I feel just as much afire and awake as the glorious trees.  I want to shake out the wrinkles in my being, stretch out my pen and write torrentially.  What about doesn’t much matter: just to be writing and alive and hear the rich wealth of words wandering around my world of thoughts again on golden paws.

You could say this is only the autumn fever; that my real self will come back tomorrow, or the next day, and continue to do what she always does: wash dishes, cook meals, tend the hearthstone and all that.  But there is this point which I think days like these exist to bring out in us: our real selves are not the jobs we do every day, the mundane considerations which we must make daily to earn our bread and shelter.  Our real selves are what we experience in these moments of many-colored, prismatic essence.  But by being brought to remember ourselves in this way, we light our everyday tasks with a little of “the divine spark;” we lend our essence once more to our existence, and make it Real.