Invitation To The Dance

Dan Bosserman, NW Connection

“Autumn…the year’s last, loveliest smile.”— William Cullen Bryant

I’m looking out my kitchen window at Mt. Hood on the day before the first day of autumn and see no indication of any change of color in the trees. I imagine by the time you read this, there will be a riot of color as the autumn leaves begin to fall.

Autumn is a season of breathtaking splendor—and of steady decline. For many it’s a time of increasing melancholy. The days grow shorter and colder, the trees cast off their glory, and summer’s richness starts to decay toward winter’s death.

For years my enjoyment of the autumn color show soon changed to sadness as I watched the beauty fade. Fixated on the browning of summer’s green growth, I let the prospect of death cast a shadow over all that’s life-affirming about fall and its lush delights.

Then I began to appreciate this simple fact: all the “falling” that’s going on out there is full of promise. Seeds are being planted and leaves are being composted as earth prepares for yet another green season.

Today, at age 79 — as I experience the autumn of my own life — I find nature a dependable guide. It’s easy to focus on everything that goes to ground as time passes: the breakup of a relationship, the disappearance of good work that was done well, the waning of a sense of purpose and meaning. But as I’ve come to understand that life “composts” and “seeds” us— as autumn does the earth— I’ve seen how possibility gets planted in us even in the most difficult of times.

Looking back, I see how the employment I lost pushed me to find work that was more compatible, how the detour sign turned me toward a countryside that enchanted me, how a loss that seemed unbearable forced me to find new purpose. In each of these experiences, it seemed that something was dying, and so it was. And yet deep-down, amid all the falling, quietly and lavishly, the seeds of new life were always being sown.

The confident hope that new life is hidden in dying is surely bolstered by the visual splendors of autumn. What artist would paint a deathbed scene with the vibrant and vital palette nature uses? Perhaps death contains a grace that we who fear dying, who find it ugly and even obscene, cannot see. How shall we understand nature’s testimony that dying itself — as devastating as we know it can be — contains the hope of a certain beauty?

At least a partial answer is offered in these words from Thomas Merton:

“There is in all visible things… a hidden wholeness.”

In the visible world of nature, a great truth is concealed in plain sight. Decay and beauty, darkness and light, death and life are not opposites: they are held together in the paradox of the “hidden wholeness.” In a paradox, opposites do not negate each other; they cohabit and co-create in mysterious unity at the heart of reality. Deeper still, they need each other for health, just as our well-being depends on inhaling and exhaling.

Because we live in a culture that prefers the ease of “either/or” to the complexities of “both/and,” we have a hard time holding opposites together. We want light without darkness, the wonders of spring and summer without the demands of autumn and winter, the pleasures of life without the pangs of death. We make Faustian bargains hoping to get what we want, but they never truly enliven us; and cannot possibly sustain us in hard times.

When our fear of the dark causes us to demand light around the clock, there can be only one result: artificial light that is glaring and graceless and, beyond its borders, a darkness that grows ever more terrifying as we try to hold it off. Split off from each other, neither darkness nor light is fit for human habitation. The moment we say “yes” to both and join their paradoxical dance, the two collaborate to make us healthy and whole.

Though I still grieve as beauty goes to ground, autumn reminds me to celebrate the primal power that is forever making all things new in me, in us, and in the natural world.

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