I do know why I love the smell and feel of autumn air. It’s a bit like cold water when you’re thirsty: cool, clear, and sharp. It cleans out your lungs at the same time as filling your nose with the smell of clean plant decay and wood-smoke. It’s air that seems to call you on to the horizon with its spacious chill at the same time it calls you into the warmth of everything familiar. Autumn air, like autumn, sits between two ways of life. It offers you the journeys of summer and the introspection of winter all at once. No wonder my memories of autumn include a feeling of conflicting desires. And yet, as uncomfortable as it sounds, I love the heady mixture of spreading your wings while nestling down, of getting ready to leap while finding the best way to rest, and of knowing that the world is calling you while knowing that there’s a home waiting to hold you safe. Autumn air is one of the best paradoxes in that it accommodates the wild and domesticated in one breath. And that makes sense in that autumn is the time when just as the wild world is shedding life, we are harvesting it. The contained concept of autumn is, of course, a human invention, just another way of labeling and partitioning the world. However, it’s also a real, natural phenomenon in the cycle of a world that will go on without us. So, I wonder, would the paradox still exist if we weren’t here to impose specific meanings and perceptions on it?
