Autumn Story

“An Autumn Story”

(This is not fiction: that is to say, not a construction of conscious thought. It happened this morning just the way I've described it)

Lot's of activity and change this week. Spent some time with one doctor discussing my improving knee and the fact that I can start getting more exercise to build it back up. While I also spent time with other doctors assessing my brain injury and how I should proceed with plans to build a life around my “new normal”.

Today turned out to be one of those spectacular sunny early fall days that exist as a picture in the hearts and minds of anyone who has spent much time in New England, the lust for which is renewed every autumn. All in all it seemed like a good day to begin a daily walking habit.

I walked in the warm sun, with a few early red and yellow leaves drifting in the soft September breeze. I walked by a pear tree at the end of the road, where the plump yellow orbs wafted a sweet lusciousness and invited a bite. And past an ancient just-mowed field where as a boy I rode my pony and where certainly generations before had done the same. The smell of a just-mowed field is one of those touch stones of youth stored away somewhere in my memory. As I walked, my mind wondered over the choices I've made, and still must make, and my imaginings ventured toward the unknown future with some trepidation.

Passing the pond where multitudes have skated and picnicked, and talked, and loved and cried, I decided to rest my sore knee beside the leaf dappled water. I sat on a stone bench erected by broken parents in the name of Brian, their child who left this plane much to soon and who played hockey on this pond so often and so many years before.

While I sat in the partial shade of a large oak I contemplated people's unease of getting older and of life's ultimate eventuality.

I paused and let my mind drift.

~

I felt the warm summer wind with the sun high in the sky as I languished there hanging from a limb. Plump and green and far from danger. An acorn. Life was good, and simple. The days were long and warm and mostly calm. Yes there was the occasional terrible wind and crashing rain which would claim some but not most of our community of nuts living in a rustling world of lush greenness.

One day I noticed that the wind blew cooler and our stems grew stiff and brittle. And first in ones and twos and eventually in great masses, our community was coming to an end. At first we ignored and denied what was happening, but after a time we each waited in fear while we prayed that our time would not be too soon, or cause us much pain. We looked upon those of us now resting motionless on the ground so far below, turning old and brown and decaying. What a pitiful sight. What awful thing had we done to deserve such an abject fate as this?

One lonesome cold day as the wind whipped and rain slashed as I wished the terror would stop but also hoping it would continue for at least one more day, there was silence. Peace. I was weightless and the thrashing noise turned to a soft woosh. It was wonderful. What magic had occurred? Had I been saved somehow? Was it because I was somehow special? Had I sufficiently pleased the bright warm god in the sky?

After a time was a bump, and another, and then rolling, and once again silent stillness.

Looking around I saw all the others, laying beside me in great masses. Still, but quite alive and looking back at me.

Given time to get used to things it was comfortable on the ground surrounded again by the others. Motionless, but in a way more content, for now there was no terror about to pounce except for the occasional bushy tailed beast who would steal away with some unlucky soul.

Like all the others, my shell slowly turned brown and there was a musty smoky perfume everywhere. It smelled pleasant. Expectant.

After a time I saw a crack appear in my neighbor's shell! He must have expired in the night and as he did his body gave way to its fate. Looking around I could see many others whose departed bodies had failed in the same dreadful way and who had left odd stems protruding from those cracks. Their guts exposed in a vulgar last display of fruitless effort to survive.

It was sad to finally realize that although just days before we had all thought we had been saved, it was only a pause in the relentless return to the dark infinity from which we were born just those few months prior. In the end we would be recycled through the ground, and although a new acorn would emerge after the long winter and spring, what would become of us? Where would all those stories of remembered warm days and cool nights and our aspirations and dreams finally end up? Apparently they would devolve to nothing as surely as our dark, now-rotting husks. Lost to eternity: in the end it seems, it would all be a complete waste.

~

Fear of the unknown. Fear of the future. Fear of the loss of existence; is a cold dark thing. It is a dye that stains deep into a soul. It changes how life is perceived and lived and loved.

As I sat there and imagined these things a single red leaf drifted and settled in my lap. I sat by the water and felt the warm sun on my face, and I looked up into the enormous tree from whence it fell. And I smiled because I could see what the acorn couldn't, or wouldn't. It was moving through a longer process than it knew. Those guts it would be spilling in its final act of rage against death were to become its first of millions of roots that would support a colossus that would live hundreds of years. That huge oak would remember all of these experiences, and over its lifespan, spawn countless like it. Each to ignorantly fumble along through its existence. Each never knowing its own magnificence but each unconsciously plotting a unique path to reach it.

I also smiled because I realized that perhaps unlike the acorn, I have been given glimpses of my own real self. Not enough to fully see and experience my eventual form but perhaps enough to see, to know, that a much deeper existence is real and it awaits. Unfortunately for the acorn it must travel successfully through each of the stages of growth to reach the point of being a great oak tree. My glimpses have shown me that I need not worry about such things. My peeks under the veil have shown that eventual transcendence, although having an unknown time and method, is inevitable. Is unavoidable.

So enough time having passed, and having other tasks ahead today, I left the side of the pond to walk home. As I left the gravel driveway and exited to my right, I began to walk, watching the 3 inch white line stretch ahead of me marking the side of the road. After several steps one (and only one) dark spot appeared on the line. As I walked past I noticed it was an acorn. A single perfect acorn with no others to be seen ahead or behind. I leaned down and picked it up. It was perfect and greenish but turning to brown.

When I rolled it over I found a crack and inside the crack, a little pale yellow shoot just inside.

That acorn sits as a reminder on my desk, perhaps considering its existence, as I sit and consider mine.

Sept 28, 2012

JKM III

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Epilogue

I have been spending a lot of time trying to improve my understanding of the nature of life, of existence, of consciousness, of reality. A big task to be sure, and perhaps a wandering road with no end, but it seems to me a reasonable cause none the less.

Circling around this topic are the existential questions: where did we come from, and upon our demise where do we “go”? In a passage from “Across The Unknown” written in the 1930's a living person was posing questions to an entity about our inability to see beyond the veil of death. This inability, to have direct experience of that which lies “beyond”, is why many rely on faith as a bedrock principal. Unfortunately, to me, and many others, “faith” is intellectually bankrupt, and anyhow far to dull an instrument to be used for such a delicate and important purpose as this: as it doesn't illuminate, but rather it sooths. The entity, which was wholly in agreement, posed something like the following:

you are like an acorn, unable to see the entirety of your situation. If only the acorn could see that what it perceives as “the end” is really just a normal transition to the next part of its existence as an oak tree.

As I thought of it, that crack in the acorn's shell is no different then the teeth falling out of a 5 year-old, or the hair from a 50 year old, or the caterpillar's move into its silken tomb. These are transitions that might be viewed as the end, and so they are in a way, but they are also incremental beginnings, and more importantly in a human these things also contain a continuity of conscious existence.

Even for those who “believe” in hereafter, the conundrum of death is mostly that they can't see the far side of the doorway through which others have passed. However, according to many accounts, we do have the ability to directly experience that door from the other side while living our lives. By directly experiencing it, this would allow a journeyer to step around “belief” altogether for the surety of a “knowing”. I have so far discovered that for me, belief is hollow. It is a knowing which I seek, and perhaps to which the road leads.