north fork november

A few days ago a passage from Parker Palmer's little book, "Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation," came to mind while on retreat with some friends on the North Fork
River.

"Autumn is a season of great beauty, but it is also a season of decline: the days grow shorter, the light is suffused, and summer's abundance decays toward winter's death. Faced with this inevitable winter, what does nature do in autumn? It scatters the seeds that will bring new growth in the spring - and scatters them with amazing abandon.

"In my own experience of autumn, I am rarely aware that seeds are being planted. Instead, my mind is on the fact that the green growth of summer is browning and beginning to die. My delight in the autumn colors is always tinged with melancholy, a sense of impending loss that is only heightened by the beauty all around. I am drawn down by the prospect of death more than I am lifted by the hope of new life."


"But as I explore autumn's paradox of dying and seeding, I feel the power of metaphor. In the autumnal events of my own experience, I am easily fixated on surface appearances - on decline of meaning, the decay of relationships, the death of a work. And yet if I look more deeply, I may see the myriad possibilities being planted to bear fruit in some season yet to come."


"In retrospect, I can see in my own life what I could not see at the time - how the job I lost helped me find work I needed to do, how the "road closed" sign turned me toward terrain I needed to travel, how losses that felt irredeemable forced me to discern meanings I neeeded to know. On the surface, it seemed that life was lessening, but silently and lavishly the seeds of new life were always being sown."
- Parker J. Palmer, in "Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation"