Over the last few weeks, while my East Coast friends have been simmering in the seasonal change and waxing eloquent about how autumn is in the air and in the light and slowly sauntering up the trees, I have found myself, here in Southern California, sweltering in 110 degree weather. Rather than pine for the fall, as I am apt to do, I availed myself of the gift that is the ocean. As I sat in the sand, in an office made of driftwood, notebook in hand, gazing out at the horizon, I couldn’t help but reflect on the weather and the seasons.
Weather, like the ocean, makes me feel small. And that is a good and necessary thing. To feel the weight of my own smallness forces me to take measure of my own significance, or lack thereof, as a tiny fleck in the infinite cosmos.
It heeds neither our dictates nor our desires. There is naught that I can do to impede the progress of the sun, or to call the clouds, or impel the rain to fall. My sea-soaked thoughts ambled about exploring the bewitching charms native to each season here in my corner of the world.
Summer with its fluffy picture book-clouds above the semi-scorched land begging for respite. Radiant sunrises and ethereal sunsets, the whispering of dry grass blown by the hot wind, sweltering daytime heat melting into warm star-laden nights…
The magic of spring as Nature, shakes off the last vestiges of cold…. How, “Here comes the sun, little darling,” never fails to drift through my mind as I watch the swiftly moving clouds bring delicate intermittent showers to awaken the earth. The Hills becoming a patchwork quilt of wildflowers…
Winter exposing, laying bare the landscape; a canvas of potential, awaiting the brush of the Master artist. Old trees, nature’s sentinels, now skeletal, keeping watch over the hidden life sleeping in silence beneath the naked earth, the dark ominous cloud-heavy sky set against a backdrop of majestic snowcapped mountains…pure romance…
Autumn and the cool, crisp air. The decadent smell of moist earth. The majestic hues of falling leaves. The morning vista obscured by a fog that slowly dissipates revealing clouds settled down over the mountain tops in a thick luxurious blanket, incandescent light breaking through in rapturous rays…
Each season harbors enchantments of its own. However, I feel most myself in the fall and I don’t think I am alone in that. It is deeper than the physical elements. There is something mystical about the slow descent into winter that mirrors the primordial longings of the human heart as it keeps the rhythm of passing time. Chesterton says the way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost and perhaps that is why fall speaks to so many, for it is an actual watching of that which is being lost, and so we experience a touch of the transcendent: memento mori encapsulated in the very groaning of the earth…as the leaves in all their luminous splendor fall to the ground.
The seasons are an expression of the cyclical cadence that is life in this world and of the mystic beauty of the soul’s search for meaning in the invisible made visible. Weather serves as a tangible reminder to me that there is a deeper life animating this one. Sacred truths evoke gratitude, their power magnifying my dependency and recalling to mind that…
He hath made every thing beautiful in his time…
Lovely images- your poetic prose evokes longings for each of God's seasons. They are necessary somehow for us human beings. Even the devastation wrought by the weather somehow fits in- but how? The Church's calendar- the liturgical year and its feasts and fasts- is another way to make meaning out of it all. Thank you again for sharing your thoughts, Fleur- you are a gift!
“There is something mystical about the slow descent into winter that mirrors the primordial longings of the human heart as it keeps the rhythm of passing time.” ❤️