30. autumn
and S.A.D bandaids
This past week has been gorgeous. And I am not talking about how my heart has been feeling. Everything around me looked beautiful (which has of course helped the heart. And after I closed my laptop on Friday and left the house to catch the last bits of autumn sunshine, I realised something—I really love autumn!
And I get this strange anxiety with every passing day of this season. No, I am not anxious about my work, or my life or even the fact that the year is ending and I haven’t finished The Artist’s Way yet. I am sad that autumn is so transient.
How do I explain this feeling? I have been thinking about it since the tree outside my window turned yellow one morning and then, I saw her shed her leaves – slowly but surely – over the next few days. As I saw the winds take her fragile, golden leaves away, I was filled with a feeling of a certain loss.
When in early spring, her leaves had started to sprout – one small green addition after the other – I couldn’t ignore the joy knocking around inside me. Maybe it was the cliché human programming that makes us believe that Spring is the beginning of something new. That summer is around the corner and as the days get longer and the sun gets brighter, everything will slowly get better until it hits a crescendo with a day at the beach in August. Sand-kissed, sun-loved, happy.
But when autumn comes around, puts its arms around us in a sort of protective embrace, and holds our hearts and our eyes hostage with its mesmerizing beauty, I am suddenly aware of transience. October comes around every year, heralding sadness, signalling the darkness and the beginning of the long winter months. There’s nothing to look forward to in the quiet and gloom, in the perpetual feeling of being stuck at 4 pm. Our vitamin D tablets and sun lamps can’t protect us from the S.A.D. And booking tickets to our sunnier homes is just slapping band-aids on a much deeper gash.
So, when the leaves outside my window turned yellow, I was overwhelmed by the awareness of how quickly it would all give way to winter and how little time we had left to enjoy this beautiful decay that surrounded us. It was a strange fear of missing out while being in the middle of this experience. I found myself rushing off to the park every day, every time the sun peaked out of the clouds. I sat on my bed, positioned in such a way that the sun's rays, now floating in unhindered through the newly bald tree, warmed my skin while I lay on top of my blanket. I took copious amounts of photos of the changing leaves, of the leaves under my feet, of the sun caressing the benches in parks, of the light hitting the sloped roofs of the buildings around town.
There was a fevered restlessness in the way I interacted with autumn, holding it tightly in the folds of my memory, implanting its beauty deep in my mind. I was prepping myself. So, when winter comes around with its grey and dull, the recollection of the golden, the auburn and the bright red of autumn would have already done a bit of the work assigned to the Vitamin D and sun lamp.
Until next time, take many photos of your falling leaves,