Autumn and the Fall.

Autumn showed its true face today. Not the golden sun and gaudy leaf scenario of the New England Fall and the Chocolate Box Tradition, but the darker reality that lies beneath the sometime surface splendour: the autumn of death, decay and depleting daylight.

Today a keen wind howled. The death rattle could be heard in the farm gates, the snapping twigs, and the arborial detritus falling from the canopies of the copses to floors already suffocated by layers of leaf cadavers. The air above the lanes and fields was full of it; a swirling, swooning mass of brown shapes that looked black against the sky, shapes that once had the honour to be living and breathing leaves, now lifeless and twisted, ejected from their homes and falling, ever falling, as the vanquished always do. And above them the sky drove swiftly and relentlessly on in myriad shades of glowering grey, seemingly sure of purpose but actually going nowhere. And in its restless flight to anonymity, it was indecently ignorant of the carnage being wrought beneath. The light fell early tonight, which was perhaps the only nod to mercy.

Most people like autumn, I know. They see it as a time of colour, of mellow fruitfulness, of Halloween tradition and the culmination of the growing time. The work of summer is now done, and what follows can be a cosy season replete with bobbing apples and the first scent of wood smoke.

And they’re right; I don’t deny it. Neither is it lost upon me that autumn is an essential part of the cycle which I respect. But for me it’s a matter of energy. Autumn is the time when the earth energies fall, and the life they once supported falls with them. My spirits follow the fall these days, and that seems entirely natural to me.