Leaves of Autumn

I have not always liked the autumn and the cold it brings, yet every year that passes I appreciate it more and more. The brightly colored leaves that did not much catch my eye as a child seem more beautiful with the passing of time and the season that follows seems like a purification of some sort: a stripping away of the former year to make way for the new year to come, not unlike the pruning in my own life as of late. Then there will come the snows, an event that has long suggested purity and a blanketing over of that which is barren and perhaps even unlovely. The crystal patterns of each snowflake are perfect in their circular symmetry, each different (or so we are told) from all the others. And thinking of snow makes me think of the Snow Queen in Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale of the same name; she was cold, beautiful, perhaps even haughty: a complex symbol not easily collapsed into a black-and-white meaning though certainly not entirely virtuous either. Whatever else she may have been, she was a complexity to my childish imagination that I have never completely resolved.

There seems to be something about this time of year that invites a turning inward: invites looking over one’s life and taking inventory, rarely a pleasant task, but like the Snow Queen multidimensional and not easily reconciled to black-and-white meanings. We are, after all, complex creatures and even more so when we are at our simplest—fragmented, careworn, and drawn in thousands of directions we are empty shells, but quiet, reflective, content with a strange melancholy we become objects of wonder attesting that the universe is at once stranger and more wondrous than we often imagine.

Yes, I have been doing better these last two weeks. I have been up, I have been down, I have been all over the map and much has happened in my emotional life though little has changed outwardly. Walking home from class this afternoon, the sun attempting to peer from behind a cool, hazy sky, the wind icy, nipping my fingers and ears with thousands of tiny sharp daggers, I felt strangely elated. Perhaps it was the relative calm I felt after a period of extended stress; perhaps it was the change in season: perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. Crossing the second of several parking lots on my diagonal path home, I watched a young man finish his conversation with a young woman sitting in a shiny black car. Their relationship appeared to be in its introductory stages, he triumphant with her reception of him. He said his goodbyes just as I was upon them and turning, he said, “How’s it going, Brother?” far less inhibited than he normally would be, instantly checking himself for his carelessness in greeting a stranger in this way. He had forgotten himself in the moment, turning the same candor of tone on me that he had been using with her.

I understood on every level. She had empowered him. He was elated. But there are rules that are unwritten and the machismo that men display is simply an attempt to paint a tough exterior over the feeling of insecurity in a potentially dangerous world through which one would prefer to pass with a minimal of difficulty. The worse the display, the greater the insecurity, but he seemed well-adjusted and thus acting well within the unwritten parameters of normalcy. If he had been a child, I would have smiled kindly at him. He was not. He was a man and wanted to be seen as one and thus I gruffly nodded my greeting, suggesting that he had suffered no loss of dignity and that celebrating his triumph with the woman who might soon become his girlfriend and some day his wife was a thing truly to be enjoyed. He was right to have forgotten himself in the moment: would that we all could be forgetful more often!

It is amazing how much a woman can empower a man and of course the same is true in reverse in its own unique way. And it is precisely this amazing ability of empowerment between the sexes that makes relationships turn so sour when they go bad. That is another mystery: common, yes, but a mystery no less. Relationships have been the backbone of the arts and literature from the very first and never go out of fashion or lose their appeal. Indeed, as we said before about being more complex when we are simple, the fact that we come in sexed pairs of opposites and spend huge amounts of our waking moments stewing over as of yet unrealized romantic relationships for which we long, relationships in which we are currently involved, or past relationships of which we are no longer a part is itself a great mystery. We may think ourselves past this point, particularly if we are settled in a stable relationship, but what happens when conflict comes knocking? Do we ever truly rest until it is settled between us? Can we fully concentrate on much else? And how is it that no one alive exists without a male and female coming together in intimate union? Is there not something greatly mysterious about sexuality from top to bottom when one stops and considers?

You know, my task as an author is often easy, for it has been well said that a writer simply records what he observes. That would never have flown in school for a book report: to merely summarize is to miss the point of the assignment, unless one is in the earliest grades. Yet an author does that very thing with what he sees around him, both in nature and perhaps especially in human nature. He tells you about the coy way a woman twirls her hair with the tip of an index finger and he draws sighs of appreciation from his audience; he describes his awkward sense of uncertainty and they gasp in recognition. He does with words what actors do with actions: he copies people, writes down exactly what he sees. And he wonders sometimes if the reason people admire him so much when he writes in this way is because nobody really takes the time to notice any more. Or, if he is more given to a philosophic bent, he wonders at the allure of simplicity and why the mundane holds such fascination: why, for example, he can write a poem about the back of his hand, describing each hair follicle and crease and the scar from when he was scraped at the age of ten and people find him astounding and profound, gushing over his brilliance.

What is there about life that drives us and what is there about life that makes us want to run away? I suspect that just like boy-girl relationships, we are drawn to the very things that repulse us, repulsed by the very things that draw us. But that is not quite right. We are not really repulsed by boy-girl relationships, we just get our feelings hurt, feel rejected, and become jaded. We secretly care and care deeply. In fact, we care so much we do not often feel we can tell anybody about it, or at least not very many people. We are afraid they will laugh at us. So we laugh for them: we laugh at ourselves first so that if they laugh too, we can play it off as a joke. But when they do laugh, we are cut to the quick. We pretend we do not care. But we do. We are just good at lying to ourselves; emotional honesty is always the most costly and difficult form of candor to express.

I have also been told before something that I so often forget. The theology that really, truly sells and sells well is not the kind of theology that this author often writes. No, the kind of theology that sells best is the kind that is the most simple. The kind that speaks to the everyday, that gives us just enough of a spark to make it through the week, to recognize that there is hope and that we are going to be okay. It is not really the big things that make us tick, after all. It is the little stuff: a new CD should recently have been shipped and will likely arrive any day now. I anticipate its arrival all week and when I get the notice that says my order was cancelled, I feel deflated all day. My point is that we live in the little stuff much more so than the big stuff and the big stuff really only becomes just one more bit of little stuff. The new house I just bought? It makes me happy for a while, but soon it gives me little more enjoyment than the CD I have now been listening to for several weeks. That is the way we tend to be, at least in America and I suspect the entire Industrialized world as well.

Another thing we all have in common is that we secretly think—and try to hide the fact behind a disinterested yawn—that we are boring. Sometimes we think we are very exciting, but most of the time we think that not only are we boring but that others will find us so as well—especially those we least wish. We fear that. We want to be loved and accepted and we do not think that people will love and accept us if we are uninteresting. I wonder what would happen if we asked ourselves what we liked about other people and if “boring” plays a large part in our decision-making process? I wonder what might happen if we could see past our own noses long enough to see that in many ways we are all the same and that we really can make a difference in the lives of other people even if we are not as pretty or as smart or as wealthy as somebody else? That if everybody is always looking then nobody can possibly be finding; that we have to give of ourselves and that if we do, we are giving the very thing away that people most want. We want to be liked. They also want to be liked. If we decide to go ahead and like them, we give them what they want and they like us better for it. They like us because we like them. And we like them because they like us. Seems pretty simple to me, but how quickly we get confused! And we get confused because we do not want to be hurt.

Is there any of us that can honestly say that the level of thought in which we are engaged together at this present moment is not a level of thought that engages us privately for hours at a time? We put on exteriors of sophistication or prettiness or refinement of manners and those things can be very good. But sometimes we die inside because we cannot ever get past them. Perhaps the greatest mystery in life is that the things that are the most simple are the things that occupy the greatest amount of our time and attention; we worry more about the simple things in life than any other single source of care and concern. Sometimes, in rare moments, we come in contact with this simplicity of life and we feel for a time wiser than we are wise, able to see the things and persons around us with new eyes. We see them for what they are and yet we do not criticize them: we are too at peace with ourselves to do so. When we are not at peace, however, we are critical, our tone sharp, our words biting. We wonder why we are so ugly and then become even uglier because we perceive that we are being ugly. Under all the layers of wondering what is going on with us and whether or not something is the matter, we are hurting. Ugly people are hurting people: they long for love but every face they see becomes a mirror of their own inner paucity. Of course, there was one face that would never have been a mirror of their own. But while they almost certainly know His name, for one reason or another they see no need to find solace under His wings, probably because they either have never seen Him as He actually is or else it has been a very long time and they have forgotten. I do not know: I could ask myself why I so often forget Him too.

For that matter, we could all ask ourselves many questions about many things: why we love someone, why we fail to love, why we fail at love, why we feel as we do at any given moment. But life is not really a matter of black and white. It is more simple than that. And of course, more simple is just another way of saying more complex. Most simple—complex—of all is human feelings: the more straight-forward they are, the more they obscure the truth. Or perhaps in an effort to shield ourselves from their directness, we hide the truth from ourselves. Soon enough, however, they will tell on us; we can only cram them down and push them back for so long: they will not be contained forever. But we also know that we must master our emotions, for we rightly feel that it is a sign of immaturity to be mastered by them. There is wisdom in that: there are plenty of overgrown babies running around that have never finished growing up. There is a time and a place, it seems, to acknowledge our emotions and listen to what they tell us; there is also a time and a place in which we must master them and trust that if we orient ourselves correctly, our recalcitrant emotions will soon have no choice but to follow suit, initially kicking and screaming if they must but following no less.

The autumn is the time of year for reflection; a time in which the leaves are stripped from the branches and nature goes to work preparing for a new season of life. All has been pared and stripped away to the most basic foundation and the winds swirl in eager anticipation. It is not always like this: the winter spreads its blanket and the spring sprinkles bits of green here and there until the full bloom of summer is teeming with life. Every season has its place; no season has a right to be critical of the others. In the (much-altered) Hallmark retelling of Anderson’s classic tale with leading lady Bridget Fonda, the fault of the Snow Queen (as Lady Winter) was that she wanted to dominate and triumph over her other three sisters. But each season has its time and its place: the spring should not try to rush in and excise the fall; the summer should not hurry in to plunder the sparkling white gems of winter.

Archive note: See also Leaves of Autumn, Little stuff becomes big stuff, and My personal problem with God on the discussion forum regarding this newsletter.

I arrive home, my thoughts reflective of the day: they are simple thoughts and yet have their own subtle complexity. Sitting down, I take up pencil and paper—or their electronic equivalent—and try to pin down my ruminations before they escape. They are not really organized or even fully formed: rather, they are windswept, hanging on branches forlorn. Next time I sit down to write, what comes out will be different. It always is. But today it is autumn and today, at least, we shall resolve to live more fully in the moment than we often do. The truly important things in life will get done anyway—never has there been a better motivator than sheer necessity—and there is so much that simply does not matter. So much busyness in our lives clings on like stubborn leaves already dead or dying; sometimes the winds of autumn are necessary to dislodge them, for nothing else will.

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