Seasonal Sagacity

Late Summer/Autumn brings a raft of emotions and beauty, so I thought I'd used this thread to post occasional thoughts on the season, but any stray thoughts may end up here. Anyone can use this thread.



The transitory richness of late August does a sounding of the soul. How deep, how wide? A lesser soul cannot hold its' fullness.

An August day carries the warmth of a season in the sun now spent and cooling, the land is roasted and welcomes the returning mists of morning that arise as the Sun relents. No day stands in Northern Ontario, a wide array of seasons must be accommodated before the Earth returns a solar circle, so the roots of Winter and Summer can be revealed in any day - and our souls must bridge this gap.

Look west, the old monks already sing the low dirges of winter, a glance east blinds as the summer past still blazes with noon sun and cicada tones. A lesser soul cannot span this and retreats from an August day.

The year has passed 240 some days. Can the soul bear the weighty import of the discarded calendar of 2016, always growing heavier under daily accumulation, until the final massive days of December break all souls? A full 364.25 days bring me make to last August - the freshness of last fall's memories fading yet still enough to jolt the soul with recollection. A lesser soul could not bear the intersection between the weight contained in one years autumnal day and total days of a 40-year lifespan. The day could not exist with the strata of the past, the day must be built on layers of time that stretch back to creation itself - but that sort of day is too deep for 9 in the morning.

I am a lesser soul. I can only skirt at the edges of the powerful intersection where mountains of time intersect with the day and its cricket chirps. The warm trees echo deep temporal currents, the low breeze calls me back and forth into a stream of time and emotion, each second cries for what is lost and raves at mysteries still to unfold. The days grows larger and realer as the sea of time fills it, but the lesser soul cannot grow with it. The lesser soul would be but flotsam, repeatedly dragged low and spat back out until it dissolved.

My souls was sounded and found insufficiently deep to bear the day, it might balance a few months and memories but not the full import. Everyday the same judgment is passed, and it is just. Like our quasi-mammalian predecessors who danced in the shadows of dinosaurs, I must sneak at the edges of autumn days. A mammal's joy in subtlety and the warmth of August

The ravens are preparing for spring. Huge ravens swoop low between the trees as I walk trails, they croak from the heights at dawn. Soon they will be engaging in duets of synchronized flying, tumbling in fights, making weird noises and carrying branches to repair battered nests.

Ravens are such eternal inhabitants of these realms that it seems strange to find them the heralds of the approaching spring. Their blackness like the slag and rock-face that often provides the only contrast in a landscape of snow, they seem like massive chips off of them. On many winter walks those obsidian-birds are my sole companions as they patrol the bleak whiteness with their unnerving eyes.

One month from now the first geese will be heard and the thawing will be unstoppable, but on this mild mid-February day, it is the ravens who speak of the warmth to come.