It’s autumn and this year where I live we’ve had an explosion of color, practically overnight. One day everything was still lush green and the next, boom! a paintbox of colors popped open. I have been taking photos like a crazy person.
But I’ve also been loving so many quiet, humble bits of nature nearly everywhere I go and not always on the brilliant blue sky days, either. Just look at those clouds. Just look at the variety of greens as they fade into something else. Look at the red vines crawling up the trunk of a tree that’s still quite green. Look at the few little leaves that have turned yellow on an otherwise green shrub.
It’s not just the big trees and shrubs and the brilliant blue sky that enchant the eye, either. Nuts and shiny dry brown leaves have a sculptural quality that is quite beautiful. The weeds and vines, in their softer, muted shades are quite lovely, too. I feel like if I turn my head in any direction these days, including down to the ground, I’ll see something marvelous.
It’s a true embarrassment of riches.
It’s a time of year that reminds us to get outdoors every single day, rain or shine, so we don’t miss a single turn or variation in the colors of our amazing world; a time that teaches us, so clearly, of the ephemeral nature of nature and of our own lives; a time when we can see both the gorgeous and the sublime right next to that which is humble and quiet. We learn as we go and the more we go outside, I feel, the more we learn.
“What you see with your eyes is transient and ephemeral. What you see through your heart is everlasting and eternal.”― Debasish Mridha
“We humans may think of ourselves as solid objects, all flesh and bone. But take a close look, and it’s clear our bodies are composed largely of oxygen and hydrogen. We are essentially ephemeral – akin as much to wind, water, and fire as to earth.” Curt Stager, Your Atomic Self
“It is the ephemeral nature of things that makes them wonderful.” ― Yoshida Kenkō, A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees
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Thanks for listening,
Kay
P.S. MerryThoughts is the name of my first book, out of print at the moment. The word is a British one, referring both to a wishbone and to the ritual of breaking the wishbone with the intention of either having a wish granted or being the one who marries first, thus the “merry thoughts.”
