Summer Moon of the First Harvests
The first yellows and browns began to show up in the gardens a couple of weeks ago. One dicentra has turned completely. A few hemerocallis have yellowed leaves. The process of maturation leads on past fruiting bodies to the dying away either of the whole plant, counting on seeds to carry its generations forward, or of its above ground components stalks and leaves after sufficient energy has made its way into the root or tuber or corm or bulb, sufficient energy to ensure a new beginning in the next growing season.
In this sense you could say humans are more like annuals. We die away, leave the field entire and only our seed lives on. There are though those artists, poets, painters, playwrights, architects, writers, composers, musicians, engineers who store energy in their works, works which often disappear for a season or a century or even a millennia only to be unearthed in some latter day renaissance (rebirth, after all).
Not sure what it says about me but my sentiment, my inner compass points toward fall and winter, toward the longer nights and the shorter days, toward the cold as opposed to the heat. A part of me, then, a strong and dominant part, sees the yellows and the browns not as grim harbingers but as the colors of the inner season only weeks away.
I don’t have quite the patience right now to explain, but I believe I have a wabi-sabi soul, a soul made content by the imperfect, the accidental, the broken and repaired, the used, the thing made real by touch and wear. Fall and winter are the wabi-sabi seasons. Their return gives me joy.
