Fall

Fall is not an ideal time. It is gray and with more rain comes the morose veil of clouds that usher in the impending quiet of winter. Down cast days to down cast eyes.

The colors on the trees visibly play herald to the time of year, the bright reds and gold of the newly lain carpet which wraps the earth in its yearly brilliant burial shroud reminds us, the sharp hint of ripeness on the air, the cold and silence of the nights. They all obstinately lay claim to the undeniable truth, the summer is over, death is come.

Alber Camus one said that:

In a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or hope of a promised land. The divorce between man and life, the actor and his setting is properly a feeling of absurdity.

Camus’ here speaks of the painful knowledge that comes upon a person when hope is gone, when a world, once explained seems explained away, the drabbest of revealed secrets.

Life, from one's youth, is chalk full of expectation, a hopeful exuberance that exudes possibility. Sun and trees, birthdays and music, finality and filament through which life might come aflame...

But, the long awaited for truth comes upon us in pieces; from the first time you learned the meaning of ‘divorce,’ when you knew that cancer was more real than rabbit holes leading to wonderland, it finds root.

We come to realize that ‘it’, whatever ‘it’ is, that thing that came upon you in the sunshine and fresh sheets and comfort of a mother’s love, is somehow distant now. It is still there, like an ache longing to be massaged, but we cannot reach it. It is too deep. This companion of childhood while never gone, now only exists at the periphery of your thought…the remembrance of an otherworldly touch, the balm to our souls distress which we cannot now know beyond a memory.

Somewhere along the way we exchange this desire for the rugged toil of older men, the trading of hope for the consistency of today, one more payment, one more drink, job, coffee, episode, night

…. This is the never ending measure of absurdity. 

…The knowledge that we feel plotted, that there is the deepest hope that there is plot and purpose to our lives, but that almost all of life lived seems to be more plodded than plotted; plodded along through knee high muck and worn roads, worn soles trudging under worn souls. The march of the downtrodden carries on. We, the once exuberant soldier, have forgotten the pleasures of a home we once knew, they are not worth thinking upon, they are, after all, only dreams. We enact the passive labors of the survivor without the hope of salvation.

C.S. Lewis once said; “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world” and I think there is some hope in this.

That in death there is life. That in the seed dying there is an everlasting harvest, a resurrection. That in this life we are only experiencing the fall, the dying of one’s self, and that there is yet the hope of spring, when death itself will be undone.

-JS