It would take a hard heart indeed not to enjoy this wonderful season. The smell of bonfires in the air and the crunch of leaves underfoot, the constant rainfall of conkers and the brief few weeks of golden radiance amongst the boughs of the trees, this is a season that easily ignites a childhood nostalgia, a memory, hazily recollected of simpler times. It is one of the quirks of nature that it makes death a scene of beauty, a final burst of colour before the long sleep of the winter, as if it wishes us all a fond farewell and begs us not to forget it so easily.
The best way I find to enjoy it is to feel it, to sit down on the damp earth, to feel the cool ground soak and muddy your trousers, to pick up a handful of leaves, that miniaturised world of earth and insects, and put your face in it and smell it. The scent of the season, it rivals anything the first days of spring can offer. It's intoxicating in it's aromas, you can feel the tendrils of it's scent exploring your body and enriching your brain. It's a real rush and one I get excited just thinking about.
Children understand what autumn is about, they have a natural instinct for pleasure and happiness which hasn't yet been tainted by the lessons of life or weighed down by the adulthood responsibilities that none of us really want but resignedly carry, the burden we assume because that's what we're supposed to do. They run in the parks and dive headlong into piles of carefully raked leaves, exulting in the mess, revelling in the filth and giggling at the sheer fun of it all. They always seem to have a stick in their hands, cutting at the nettles in a swashbuckling manner or poking at the mud and making appreciative sounds at it's consistency. They see the season for what it is, and celebrate the death that surrounds them with their own youth and life. As a child I always enjoyed walks in the woods with the family Dog, when days of rain had made the wood sodden and the ground a thick, viscous ooze, and the scent of autumn seemed to be holding you closely and tightly to it's bosom. I'd always return to the house feeling exhilarated, as if I'd been amongst something special, had experienced something unique and personal. It is natures ability to bring out these feelings, to make you feel like you have experienced something beyond explanation, as if you have connected with something bigger and more profound then yourself, which inspires my love of it.
In an ever more increasingly technological age, where we are cut off from each other and the outside world by the walls we have built up around us of digital devices, and computerized distractions. Where we cannot have a conversation with each other without turning to our phones and bathing in the cold, soulless glow of the LCD screen which dispassionately monitors our button presses and files us away in trends and demographics. Where we are consumers instead of creators, a human resource instead of simply and majestically a human. I feel we ever more so need to truly connect with the natural world around us as an anchor for the soul, lest we drift and float away into the cloud, where we all have a voice but no one is heard, and where everything is to be seen but none has a meaning.
Technology will give us everything we want and from that point onwards we will inevitably decline and fall, our autumn years too will be accompanied by the stink of death, but unlike the trees, we will have no spring.
At a wood near you...
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