“What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew.”

– Robert Browning

Perhaps, one day, I will lose this sense of endings and beginnings; but Fall still lingers and today still hovers between the young and vital part of the year and the aged silence of Winter.  There is rain falling today; and as I watch it pelt down on the muted landscape and see the last bits of Fall wash down the gutters toward the storm drains, I marvel at the constancy of rain.  It falls as snow in wintertime.  It calls forth new life in the first days of spring.  It cools the sun and sparkles like treasure on the lush green leaves of summertime.  And now it comes to clean the slate so that the cycle can begin again.

Today, as the rain falls and cleanses the earth, I find that I feel older.  Another year has gone.  Life has brought me once again to the place of endings.  I try to remember — did I feel this way when I was in my twenties?  Did I understand then that only what remains after an Autumn rain really was true in the first place?  Did I cry because I wanted to hold onto the summer dew and think that it would last forever?  Did I hide from the feeling that maybe a part of me also was being washed toward the storm drain, never to be seen again?

Autumn is good for the earth.  It is a time for the release of all that seems so necessary but really must be shed so that life can go on.  Autumn’s example is good for us, too.  How can we have room in our hearts to welcome the next cycle of seasons if we feel the need to accumulate them from year to year?  How can we have room in our souls to reach for our true destiny if we need to comfort ourselves with things that do not last?

I feel a bit older today as Autumn washes down the street; but it is said that Wisdom comes with age.  I’m thinking that Wisdom may be little more than finding our arms so filled with the things that really don’t matter that we are forced to relinquish them and let them be washed away.  When we learn to see the dew as dew and not crystals — when we learn to see the beauty of life as both fleeting and satisfying, when we know with a deep knowing that it is the lasting part of ourselves that calls forth their beauty in the first place — then we can be free to let go and live.  With the Wisdom of age — the Wisdom of Autumn — we see that letting go allows our light to shine without obstruction.  Today it illuminates the beauty of Autumn rain.