By Pat Kriss

The wind chimes on our porch awakened me yesterday morning. Their morning gift was not only their music but the realization that, overnight it seems, Autumn had let itself in our back door. Leaves in the forest behind our house had changed to a cascade of hues marching before my bedroom window. The wind itself, blowing gustily out of the East off the Atlantic Ocean, heralded yet another change. A storm was on its way.

This is my favorite season, although I know that others feel quite differently.

For some not even the riotous colors of the fall leaves can take away a foreboding, an interpretation that the trees and all living things around them are dying, that somehow we have traded the security of endless warm summer days and crickets for the bite of frosty mornings and a descent into darkness where only the North wind howls.

You can look at change that way, if you want. In fact most of us will allow ourselves to buy into the concept of sameness as a sign of security, usually at some point when life presents us with a shock, a massive injustice, a challenge, a withdrawal of something we count on. We greet these occasions with a sense of outrage, of betrayal. It's not supposed to BE like this…it's not fair. I'm supposed to feel safe. We did not deserve this. I didn't deserve this--- we utter either silently or in the company of trusted friends who, we know, will tolerate our periodic rantings.

But for every person who tells you that he loathes the fall, there are a dozen more who “get it.” An army of others who realize that autumn colors mean not death, but a return of strength into the very root heart of the tree. In reality the process of sap returning to the roots actually began in midsummer under the cloak of the chlorophyll in the leaves. Now deep underground, this accumulating strength will nourish the tree as it goes within itself to process what the year has brought. All things, it seems, need to journey inward as the winds blow outside, in order to emerge stronger and with new stature.

The radiant leaf colors we see now have been there all along, it seems, hiding from our vision until the first frost stripped away their disguise. Inherent in the shift of seasons is the promise, not merely of winter blast, but of the eternal resurrection we call spring. Sameness in the living world is an illusion. Only things that are lifeless remain the same. It is what differentiates the rock from the rose petal. Life itself surges forward on the wings of change.

Therein lies the myth. Is safety the same thing as sameness? Is a sure thing always the best thing for bringing us to a higher level? Why do we fear change so much?

Of course I want to feel secure. Of course I want to be safe from harm. To know security and safety is a driving force in the human soul. But in reality, it is not the forces of change--- positive or negative--- that cause insecurity, that make me fear for the future, or make me loathe the signs that life is no longer as it was. It is my own doubt and fear whether I will be up to the challenge of what the future holds that haunts my dreams. And why? Because I, in my own way, have come to think that this new challenge, this new illness, this departure of a source of love and nurturing in my life is taking place because I must have done something to deserve it. Someone, somewhere along the line taught me this long ago, and it has lingered in my system like a virus, waiting for a weak spot in my skin to erupt. Bad things happen to bad people and will continue to do so, the voice of the past chants. But bad things don't happen to bad people. Bad things don't happen to good people. Bad things simply happen.

It is the winter of our soul season. It is part of the fabric of the Universe, the Yin and Yang of balance that Eastern thought understands so well and which somehow we Westerners choose to ignore for the most part. To understand the Yin and Yang of our lives, we need, like the tree in autumn, to go within, to digest what has happened, to make intimate contact with the strengths that like within.

This is a long and quiet journey that will take us to the shadowlands of our very souls. If we are observant and most of all, if we are silent, we will find that place within that is without division, wherein glows the infinite glowing ember that is God. There, in contemplation of our part of the infinite, unchanging Intelligence, we find peace. We find, at long last, that true security, in all situations; that knowing that no one can take this power from us; that nothing can destroy the infinite within us.

Trust in the Infinite in yourself, in what it holds for your future. For now, enjoy and cherish the colors in your life. Celebrate the colors in the lives of those you love. And then, rest, sleep. When Spring comes, and come it will, we will have grown in ways we cannot even imagine now. (\o/)