October isn’t just a month, it’s a feeling. It’s a state of mind and a celebration of everyday beauty. In fact, there’s no better month of the year than October to enjoy the splendors of nature, with the leaves turning colors into beautiful shades of red, gold and orange, whether you head off for a proper weekend vacation to get the full effect of the Fall foliage or you’re driving home down a street lined with trees that are all turned into different colors—a very good reminder of just how beautiful nature can be after a long hot summer of plain green everywhere.
Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery was so right when she proclaimed her love for this wonderful month. “October was a beautiful month at Green Gables,” she wrote in her famous novel Anne of Green Gables, ”when the birches in the hollow turned as golden as sunshine and the maples behind the orchard were royal crimson and the wild cherry trees along the lane put on the loveliest shades of dark red and bronzy green, while the fields sunned themselves in aftermaths. Anne reveled in the world of color about her. ‘Oh, Marilla,’ she exclaimed one Saturday morning, coming dancing in with her arms full of gorgeous boughs, ‘I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers. It would be terrible if we just skipped from September to November, wouldn’t it? Look at these maple branches. Don’t they give you a thrill—several thrills? I’m going to decorate my room with them.’”
At the same time, however, this month is somehow a messenger of death—though one wrapped in the colors of nostalgic happiness—and rebirth. In truth, it happens that before the first November frosts start, October admonishes us on the necessity of taking up the incoming challenge of winter, the most Yin of the seasons, according to the Taoist school of thought. As a matter of fact, in winter, when the earth lies dormant and nature appears frozen and dead, we’re called to look into our depths, to reconnect to our inner being, to befriend the darkness within us and around us. This means, interiorly speaking, that while winter is at the same time the season of rest and reflection and the most challenging time of the year, autumn in general and October, in particular, is the time of the year when something old ends—in a blaze of glory—and something new is brewing and about to begin. In other words, it’s true that, as Robert Frost puts it, nothing, especially that which is perfect and beautiful, can last forever:
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
Still, for every death there is a birth, for every ending there is a new beginning. “Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.” (Hermann Hesse, Bäume. Betrachtungen und Gedichte)
