Surrender

Autumn is that thin place between the abundant color and hot, sweaty days of summer and the barren landscape and cold night of winter. The morning light greets brisk, lung-clearing air, which gives way to warmer afternoons with a fair interspersion of foggy mornings and drizzly-damp afternoons. (Well, that last hasn’t happened yet, but perhaps if I write it, it will soon be true. I am a strange southerner, with a northwesterner's love of fog and drizzle.) The trees turn brilliant color almost overnight. The beauty of the red-gold-orange trees arching over the city streets is almost painful. Driving borders on dangerous, with attention diverted. The late-season flowers in my garden take their last gasp bloom-burst as the leaves blaze into completion of their cycle and then let go, like a dizzyingly spinning ice-skater just before she digs her blade tip into the ice to bring her performance to an abrupt, arms-raised, face-tilted-upward, triumphant end.

And then it’s gone. The perennials begin their descent into the ground for the long winter rest; and with one good wind storm the leaves loosen their hold on branches and fall to yards and sidewalks where they can be shuffled through on foot. The weeping Japanese maple I planted this year is at its golden peak mid-week and by the weekend the delicate leaves are shattering onto the ground. With the winter solstice just a month away the nights grow longer and colder. The sun gets increasingly weak. Windows, finally opened after the endless summer heat, are closed again for the duration. It’s over. Autumn. Like the intense passion of a love affair, you have to stay awake for it. Throw yourself into it. Soon it’s only memory. Memories to keep you warm through the winter wait for spring—and new life. Autumn is a visible surrender to the reality of cycles.
 
It is not quite here yet, but I await with restless anticipation this time of winter stillness. My introvert personality gets exhausted by the intensity of summer activity. I put the garden to bed under a mulch comforter--leaves this year, instead of expensive bagged bark mulch. I am ready to come indoors; to wrap up in my afghan, light the candles, and build a fire against the darkness and the cold. Ready to settle in with a glass of wine, book or knitting, and my lap-cat. Ready for the sound of the wind rattling the windows and rain rushing through the downspouts. Ready to hope for a city-shutting snowfall. I confess, though, at this moment I am enjoying sitting under the dogwood tree, that weak sun slanting through the translucent leaves and warming my face. A soft breeze rattles the leaves and assists them in their swirling dance to the ground.

I feel an urgency in the fall. I want to clean up; make the garden tidy to begin its long winter’s sleep. I pull weeds and spent annuals, and any of the past season’s iris leaves that surrender easily to my tug; new growth has already emerged. I want to prune the blooming camellia and berry-laden pyracantha leaders that shoot up from the top of the bushes; but though the messiness bothers me, I am afraid the seventy-degree days are still too warm, and cutting them back will only encourage growth. An error I have already made once, and now they must be pruned back again. Last weekend I picked a last bowl of grape tomatoes so I could pull the vines. They are ripening in my kitchen window. I expect the vines would have produced more, but the fruit is no longer sweet; and besides I am tired of them.

The leaves carpet the ground. I shuffle my feet through them, loving the crunch and the color. I wish I could be as lighthearted about all that has fallen from my tree of life. The holidays are an annual test. I still want them to be what I anticipated twenty years ago they would be: children and partners and grandchildren home for the holidays, filling the family home again with their sounds and their presence, the smell of baking in the air. Laughing over memories of days gone by; complaining that the larder contains "nothing to eat"; playing games and watching movies. Nothing can make up for the fact that the holidays are not that; at least not for me. But dead leaves left to lie, kill the grass the way sorrow, regret, and anger held close for too long kills joy. I rake up the leaves and move them to the new beds I have made, compost to turn into the soil in the spring in preparation of new growing things. Every last leaf does not get raked up. Like bits of sorrow they blow and bounce across the yard, until even they, too, disappear. Surrendering to the season, and the way things are.

As the garden descends back into the ground, the plants are sustained by the earth--protected from the elements, covered by their blanket of leaf mulch. It reminds me that the dead, dark, barren places that live in all of our souls--whether or not we are able to acknowledge them--have a right to be, and an authentic place within the protection of our beings. 

I go to great lengths today to skirt the pre- Thanksgiving Christmas parade traffic to get to the Farmers’ Market for a load of firewood. On the way I stop and, at long last, put air in the wheelbarrow tire so I can haul the wood from the car to the stack under the deck. At the market, while studiously avoiding the east end where Christmas trees are being unloaded, I find myself looking for red and green, even as I resist the commercial season. It is here in abundance: tandem displays of pink lady and granny smith apples, collards and sweet potatoes, red and green peppers, zucchini and new potatoes, red tomatoes next to green. Surrendering to the fact of the season.

Fulfillment is so much about surrender, demanding that we let go. The work is done and we must detach. We finish a big project and fall again into the abyss of unknowing. Empty. Autumn in the garden is like that to me. But the loss brings with it the freedom to open up to what will come next. Lying fallow is not doing nothing. In our nakedness and emptiness, we make room for the One who is More. We open up to mystery. Advent. I lament that in the south, fall collides with commercial Christmas. But commercialism aside (would that it could be ignored), this week I am noticing that with one week of leaf fall left before the beginning of Advent, perhaps it is all part of a meaningful continuum. The trees, and with them their own inner beings, surrender to an ending just as we commence to lie empty as we await the coming of the Baby.

And on the seventh day, God surrendered to the need for rest. Surely the seventh day was winter.