Autumnal Blessings

Autumn is my favorite season. If summer encourages us to be outward facing, autumn, with its progressively shorter days, beckons us to turn inward as we prepare for the metaphorical death we are bound to experience in winter.

When I lived in Minamata, every now and then I’d treat myself to a day trip to Kumamoto City. In autumn, the ginkgo leaves turned to a golden yellow and carpeted the ground right outside Sakura-no-Baba Josaien, a vibrant cultural hub at the base of the hill upon which Kumamoto Castle stands.

November 2017

I could have spent a long time just admiring the fallen leaves. I find it interesting that although letting go of something or someone we hold dear can feel so hard, when trees do it, it looks so beautiful and effortless.

We cherish things, Japan has always known, precisely because they cannot last; it’s their frailty that adds sweetness to their beauty. In the central literary text of the land, The Tale of Genji, the word for “impermanence” is used more than a thousand times, and bright, amorous Prince Genji is said to be “a handsomer man in sorrow than in happiness.” Beauty, the foremost Jungian in Japan has observed, “is completed only if we accept the fact of death.” Autumn poses the question we all have to live with: How to hold on to the things we love even though we know that we and they are dying. How to see the world as it is, yet find light within that truth.

—Pico Iyer, Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells

Grief has been a big theme for me this year—and for many others, I imagine. In the face of these unprecedented times, I’ve spent a lot of time grieving the life I thought I would have when I was younger and the world I believed we would be living in at this point.

Arriving at a deep acceptance of what is here now, I think of the ginkgo trees and wonder whether in our own letting go we might look as beautiful as them. This autumn, may you keep finding beauty in both expected and unexpected places.