The Seasons

                                Ten thousand flowers in the Spring, the moon in Autumn.

                                A cool breeze in Summer, the snow in Winter.

                                If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things,

                                this is the best season of your life. 

                                                                          - Wu-Men (1183-1260)

 

The clocks have fallen back and now all dinners are by candlelight. There’s a chill in the air announcing the closing of the year and though not the spectacular fireworks of leaf-changing trees in San Francisco, still a few spots of color and memories of my East Coast childhood. Though we strive to equally love all our students alike and our own children as well, we secretly all have some slight preferences. Wu-men suggests the same for seasons, aligning ourselves with the particular gifts of each one. Yet we still can’t help but have preferences. 

 

As a child, it was a toss-up between the freedom of a school-less summer, its firefly-flashing evenings, trips to the Jersey shore, long hot days and the bells of the Good Humor Ice Cream truck and the excitement of the next grade of September school, the colors and crunch of autumns leaves raked in piles, the child-friendly weirdness of Halloween and family-cozy feeling of Thanksgiving. As an adult, summer and autumn continued to compete, that same sense of summer vacation’s freedom (my good choice to be a teacher and keep that schedule intact!) and autumn’s new turn of the wheel with new classes, a still delightfully weird Halloween and family-connecting Thanksgiving. Though San Francisco’s chilly foggy summer and summer-hot autumn are quite different from my New Jersey childhood, still their essence resonates.

 

Having written recently of my equally extroverted and introverted character, summer clearly accents the extro and fall the intro. But if I had to choose, I think I’d lean slightly to fall, that subtle sense of mortality infused in the darkening days and the falling leaves and the bittersweet beauty inside it all. You can feel it in the haiku poets, whose best work for me seems to be their autumn poems. I have a few soundtracks associated with fall, most notably the middle movement of Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata and the Incredible String Band’s album The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter. Both were the soundtrack to one of my most memorable Autumns in the Fall of 1969, my first semester at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

 

Autumn in Yellow Springs, with Glen Helen, its 1000 acre Nature Preserve adjacent to the campus, is one of the more exquisite displays of autumn splendor. I spent many a long hour wandering joyously in the Glen and drinking in the smells, sights and sounds. I listened yesterday to that Incredible String Band album and just as trauma is stored in the muscle memory of the cells, so are our moments of great beauty. I could feel again in this old body the thrill of beginning my new life, independent of my family and familiar New Jersey home, opening to new people, new ideas, new experiences. Combined with that 18-year old restlessness and uncertainty about who I was and where I belonged and what is this life all about anyway? A bit of unrequited love (or at least a crush) to add to the mix, adding just a touch of sour to the sweetness. Each note on that album indelibly etched in my musical and muscle and emotional memory, calling it all up and feeling the freshness of that emerging life rising up again almost 50 years later. All of which transformed yesterday’s walk in Golden Gate Park, re-seeing today’s life with the eye of yesterday’s. 

 

This is not nostalgia. I’ve paid my dues to arrive at the place where my mind is less and less “clouded by unnecessary things” and am finally learning to appreciate each season of this life. Which not only means the annual yearly cycle, but well-describes an entire life-cycle as well. The Spring of childhood, the Summer of early adulthood, the Fall of late adulthood, the Winter of elderhood. I’d like to think I’m somewhere on the cusp of late Fall and early Winter and indeed, each has been the “best season of my life.” Gratitude abounds.