Autumn’s Invitation

Autumn resonates with the tone of Beauty and whispers the invitation toward letting go. Autumn is the harbinger of winter. It is that luminous time of letting go of the beauty of Spring and the fecundity of Summer. Life turns toward perceived death, and in its letting go it strikes our senses like no other. The sight, sound, touch, and smell, and taste are brought to full attention. The letting go is so often the climax of being alive. Acute paradox is so often the space of spiritual attention.      

I would like to share two poems to invite us to this space of Life/Death.    

Kirk Webb
(Director of the Celtic Center)

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Swans at Coole 
—William Butler Yeats

The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?

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 Nothing Gold Can Stay
—Robert Frost

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.