Autumn is a season of mixed emotions, the beauty of warm colours sharpened or softened by sunlight, the sense that the trees are bleeding out the remainder of this year's vitality, and can no longer hide the obvious signs of fading glory, life retreating to replenish, leaves falling as they inevitably do and of biological necessity must. Poets and artists, novelists and naturalists have all written about the gentle melancholy of Autumn, the combination of regret and relief as life moves on and a new cycle begins.
Earlier today I sat looking out at the trees, now passed their best colours and semi-naked following the high winds, and listened to Vivaldi's Autumn. Gentle melancholy set to music. Early this morning I took this photo, of two leaves lying in the gutter beside my car, frosted but the sun beginning to melt the crystals. The amazing complexity of a leaf, its skeleton becoming visible, one of thousands of leaves that ensure the tree lives and grows and fruits; and the equally astonishing architecture of ice crystals; together they provide no conclusive evidence of the existence of God, nor require the assumption of a Creator.
But once recognise in our encounter with the Divine, the Love that creates and sustains, that gives richness and diversity out of a nature infinitely and eternally giving, and the vast intricacies of our universe and the micro-miracles at our feet and in the gutter, become not clues to a possibility, but glimpses of a reality beyond the controlling reach of our intellectual categories.
The other moment of significance was on the way back from Banchory, I slowed down to let a red squirrel cross the road safely. Rare beautiful little animals, and against the golden sunlight and amber leaves, a joy to behold.
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