Delicious Autumn

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns. ~ George Eliot

Autumn arrives, promising new life amidst the drama of death. Just not in San Diego where brown in all its mundane shades is more abundant because of a protracted drought. It will be good to move back to the mountains with their riotous carnival of colors. Spring is lovely and fresh and oh so green. Flowers and buds regenerate the world. But by the time August rolls around it's all  just become background - a green wash more easily ignored.

Autumn though! - autumn stirs up wonderment. When spring regenerates the world, I notice the bright new green for maybe two weeks and as an artist I assign a name to each shade of green.  New leaf green. Viridian. Phthalo green. Sap green. Olive green. I celebrate the leaves’ birth, as if the earth had donned a new outfit. But by August all that green has just become background and it's fluttering treefingers a green wash begging for another layer of color. Nothing wrong with it, except like the droughted brown of San Diego, the repetition of color inoculates me against wonder. G.K. Chesterton said, "I don't have God's capacity to delight again and again at each new leaf. He keeps unfurling them - they even wave to get my attention! - but the eyes of my soul glaze over."

I'll chose a good mountain autumn every time - where the creativity of God seems to holler!  Autumn reminds us that there’s a world of wonder and that God just doesn't know how to stop creating. Autumn's colors are so bright they seem to shine as He splashes them about with abandon. We even seek out the color in annual pilgrimages. Lest we forget though, it's an end-of-life kind of beauty. It's actually a drama of death. It is a golden sweetness before the colors quickly fade and leaves fall. Winter is coming. 

"Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, 
a torch flung to the trees."

“Earth's crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God: 

and only he who sees, takes off his shoes.”  ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning