The crisp air crackles as light filters through cinnamon maple leaves, bathing tawny wheat fields in gold. Champagne colored aspen quiver, beckoning from the Sierra. In this place jeweled colors burst into view: carmine apples piled high on a cart, auburn pumpkins dotting a field, amaranthine kohlrabi staged theatrically in baskets. Avenues of russet trees escort travelers into the amber mountains staining a cobalt sky. The last fireflies wink as they weave in a rubicund grove where two seasons meet for a brief tryst. An interval of dappled barks and tempestuous horizons.
Soon the pellucid nights will birth tales of ghosts and goblins. Bonfires will be lit to ward off death’s imminent approach. Prayers will be offered to ancestral souls wandering moonlit lanes. Sweets will be gifted to witches, skeletons, and fairies begging at doors in order to placate their more malevolent alter spirits. Autumn signals the approach of scarcity. A liminal period of transition when light and dark, good and evil appear more clearly encapsulated.
Traversing the fog shrouded forest, decaying leaves squelching beneath my feet, I become acutely aware that nature doesn’t exist in such binary, discrete entities. Ideas like mind versus matter, yours versus mine, fade in a world inhabited by inky rivers and carpeted by crimson lichen. These chiaroscuro shortened days are messy, satiated by an acute sense of time’s all-consuming essence. Without delineated boundaries to steer me forward, I’ll make mistakes, double back, halt in confusion — lose the precious hours and days I already have no control over — that’s part of the journey. How then, can I fully embrace my disordered stumbles, my muddied selves, without allowing nihilism to take over?
By remembering that nothing can be created out of nothing. By having faith that while I search for what I want, I will also discover what I need, and that this can only come through the detours, the obstacles, the snarls. It’s a constant balancing act, participating in the process while detaching from the merits, expectations, and successes.
Long ago a society in the throes of war sought to reconcile the inevitability of violence with a growing desire for contemplation and renunciation. They sought to create guidelines that evaded simple categorization for the nuances of the greater good, demanding that both individuals and institutions eschew walking the straight and narrow paths prescribed by someone else. This also meant that every person needed to bring a critical mind into each situation, judging it on its own complexities. It also required each person to accept their capability to help and harm simultaneously, both intentionally and otherwise, and to shoulder this responsibility.
Reading the ancient songs, translated, so much feels lost. I find it difficult not to revert to the modern proclivity to conflate, to rationalize, to write the story of myself as hero and savior. Perhaps it takes the most courage to tell truth to oneself. To admit that while one aches for autonomy, one also feels a desperation to belong. We’ve been asking for many thousands of years what it means to live well as a species. The answers are there, but they seem harder to follow in a burning world.
I envy the murmuring ferns, the cedar trunks, the skittering rodents in the undergrowth. Their actions haven’t brought the planet to its knees. In their daily rituals of survival, they don’t have to contemplate whether to follow consequentialism or virtue ethics. They haven’t knotted themselves into a vicious cycle of laws and prescriptions that actually do little to care for those in need. As autumn advances I also mourn the too quickly disappearing landscape. Who knows how many more seasons I can walk these luscious woods? In the meantime, I practice building a home of love for them even as I linger in uncertainties.
Bespoke Traveler Note:
The Bhagavad Gita is a Sanskrit text probably composed during the second century BCE which seeks to answer existential questions regarding the ethics of war, dharma, and an understanding of the universe. Available at your local bookstore or public library.
Thank you for listening. “Autumn Eudaemonia” was written and narrated by Atreyee Gupta. For more details, head to the website at www.bespoketraveler.com.
