It's Always Autumn Somewhere

The fall equinox has always been a cute excuse to bring people together, but I'll confess, I never really cared that much that the seasons were changing.

"Feel into what you're shedding this Fall" I probably prompted friends, over a pumpkin spice latte decorated sunroom table. We're so Autumnal, we must have thought to ourselves, in the New York City techno-social sense of the word. 

This year's a little different. Something has changed.

The equinox has now officially arrived, but I've been thinking about it for a while, fuck I've been feeling it, since I saw that first fiery orange Maple Leaf make it's way down the creek in our backyard upstate. Only a day after Labor Day, mind you, and this was the only leaf showing any color at all. It barreled down the rapids and jabbed right into my stomach as I was swimming; a bright orange canary in the coal mine that stared up at me and said "Winter is Coming." 

74 degrees and sunny outside, and I couldn't argue with that. inevitable. truth.

Winter is coming. FUCK. Winter is coming. 

I stood there for a moment and took that in, totally gutted. My insides turning inside out. I was caught off guard. How could a little leaf deliver such an apocalyptic blow? Pumpkin spice lattes never quite did that for me. 

It wasn't just that it's going to be cold soon. I grew up in Boston and have had my fair share of darkness and snow. No, somehow this leaf managed to deliver a brutal reminder of never-ending change itself.

Death, birth, love, grief.

It's funny that we celebrate Autumn on a single day. Seasons don't suddenly turn on equinoxes and solstices, they are and were always turning. We are always turning. We are always changing. We are always dying, and we are always grieving.

When we first arrived upstate a little over two months ago I couldn't believe how beautiful it was — in a Travel & Leisure magazine cover or damn that's definitely Instagram worthy kind of way. Our backyard is stunning, and I consumed it for a while, but it wasn't long until I stopped taking photos. 

When people say photos "don't do it justice," they might mean that they can't capture the colors quite right or maybe don't have the photo skills, but for me it’s something else. It's the inherently static atomized nature of a photo contrasted against an abundantly alive and always-changing and evolving natural world.

Something dies when captured.

As I sat in my backyard day after day I realized that describing nature as having just four seasons does a disservice to what's actually going on here.

Every month, every week, every day was slightly different than the prior. There was the four-day period where eastern tent caterpillars created silk tents that lined the trees around us, the two-week period where honeysuckles bloomed and attracted a dozen hummingbirds, and now the local river otters searching far and wide for the shelter they'll call home for the winter. 

In Japanese, there are twenty four distinct Seasons, each lasting just 15 days. Somehow, we were given the language for only four.

Travel & Leisure and Instagram have a way of romanticizing things, but watching nature change hasn't been easy for me. There's a part of me that sits out there and wants to scream at the top of my lungs and tell the trees:

JUST GET IT OVER WITH ALREADY. 

The slow, steady shedding makes me viscerally uncomfortable. I am brought face to face, one excruciating leaf at a time, with my own inevitable march toward nakedness. My own impatience, powerlessness, the ways I am not yet alive and the ways I am already dead, my own never-ending seasonal samsara. 

My friend joked that the opioid epidemic Upstate stems from people not able to handle the aliveness of the northeastern nature. It's all too much, so they dissociate with heroin. There are perhaps more plausible reasons for their addictions, but he's gesturing at something that’s real and underpins them. I too was a drug addict, and I too dissociated and numbed myself from the unbearable reality of being alive.

This is my first time living in the woods. I grew up and have lived in cities for 30 years. Cities are a different kind of nature, but it's important to remember that they too are natural. The National Parks program, which has since spread all across the globe as the gold standard for protecting our wildlife, has given us the sense that nature is over there, and we are over here. That's a beautiful buffalo roaming through Yellowstone, and we are heathen humans dwelling alongside rats on N 1st and Berry St. 

But we are nature. We've evolved from the same Mother. This is what has become clear to me most of all in going back and forth between places. Cities are a different kind of stream than the one we plunge into everyday upstate, but they are also streams. There's an aliveness that exists between and among us in the city that has its own force and direction as inevitable as the leaves changing or the rivers flowing into the ocean.

New Yorkers will tell you about the first spring day when everyone seems to sprout in their own way and the parks are chock full, or the cozy snow of the holidays, or how on particularly dark and rainy days everyone's suddenly in a shitty mood. There are ebbs and flows, rises and falls, rhythms to city-living.

These are more than the weather impacting how we feel from time to time, they are us, being nature, together. 

We are synced. Especially in the close corridors of New York City. Everything is changing, and not just randomly, but in a very particular kind of way. Just as there are 24 apparent Seasons in “nature” there are far more natural ebbs and flows to this city than we are ever aware of or have names for. 

We can learn to listen and learn to attune.

I wonder what those names might be if we had them. I wonder what we’d feel if we didn’t dissociate from the full extent of their aliveness. I wonder what it would be like to surrender to such cycles.

It's easy to be so cliche as to be passed over. But cliches are cliche for a reason, because often, there's something deeper beneath them. We are nature. It’s in our nature. We are forces of nature. Nature heals all. So, embrace your true nature.

Stop and smell the roses. Stop in the middle of Berry St. and allow yourself, for a moment, to be gutted by a Maple Leaf.