Autumn blues…greens, reds, and browns

These last few days have been sublime providing sunny moments to shore against the winter. As it unfolds, each beautiful day is like an un-birthday present, an extra unexpected nuggety choc chip in the ice cream of life.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.
- George Eliot

Autumn expresses completion of the cycle, the reap-ture, when everything is bathed in balmy glow and shadows. For the last few days I have woken up and glanced out the window at the back of the house north towards the Heath and Highgate Hill and seen a sheen of opalescent mist almost dissolving before my eyes. Milky-white becomes soft blue before the sun breaks through suffusing the landscape with an impressionist’s palette of colour. Stanley Horowitz put it well:  Winter is an etching, spring a watercolour, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all. 

It symbolises a kind of perfect impermanence: “Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.” The guttering of the candle, the star flaring before it dies, the old lion shaking its shaggy mane, Keith Floyd’s final self indulgent blow out meal – yes, you want the year to die with its boots on, defiantly brandishing a burning brand. And you can smell it in the parks and leafy lanes – deep earth and resin – as if the earth is being sealed in the memory of old warmth, spendthrift gold and glory of the year-end… earth scents and the sky winds and all the magic of the countryside which is ordained for the healing of the soul.

The beauty of autumn is like the beauty of a sunset “…the time between the lights when colours undergo their intensification and purples and gold burn in the window panes like the beat of an excitable heart… when the beauty of the world which is soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish”. (Virginia Woolf – A Room of One’s Own).