Fall

I won't lie. I love the melancholy of a gray fall day when the wind is whipping and leaves are flying. I love it in the same way that I love the season of Lent. It's time that doesn't expect much out of you. Unlike the season of pre-Christmas where we are forced into happiness or summer with the incessant daylight, these days allow me to take a break, have a pensive moment.

One of my favorite poems and the only one I've ever memorized is e.e. cummings "a leaf falls-loneliness." 

Somehow cummings captures the beauty of the falling leaf and the solitariness of letting go of life. 

Endings and changes are such beautiful gifts. 

I fear finding life tedious or boring more than I do death. I fear that I will take the beauty and gift of each day for granted and forget to keep living and being surprised. 

So I watched the leaves fall today on my lovely walk through the bogs and woods. I watched the skunk cabbage decaying and the fireweed giving up its ghost. It's messy and a different kind of pretty than brilliant summer days and vivid colors. But, it was so relaxing; expecting nothing out of me than to keep passing by. 

Robert Earl Keen has one of my favorite melancholic songs called Lonely Feeling and this is the stanza that always sticks out to me:

It's a statue of Jesus your grandmother had when she died

All cracked and all yellow and you know you should throw it aside

But you're growin' religious, the older you get

You haven't been saved but it could happen yet

Kierkegaard would also argue for the gift of melancholy. It can lead us to despair, which is not a helpful place to go. But it can lead us into the external eternal (my words, not his). Melancholy makes us face the reality that nothing lasts forever, and reach outside of ourselves to hold onto that which does. 

Since Kierkegaard lived before plastic, his answer would be the love we see in Jesus. I'm going to stick with that one too. 

The happy Jesus button doesn't make the melancholy go away and force me into smiles all the time, but it gives me the strength to keep walking through whatever season I'm in. But hopefully not before I can talk my husband into letting me buy a couple more flannels and sweaters.