I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority. – E. B. White
Photography
“I like spring, but it is too young. I like summer, but it is too proud. So I like best of all autumn, because its tone is mellower, its colours are richer, and it is tinged with a little sorrow. Its golden richness speaks not of the innocence of spring, nor the power of summer, but of the mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age. It knows the limitations of life and its content.”- Lin Yutang
“Every year, in November, at the season that follows the hour of the dead,
the crowning and majestic hours of autumn, I go to visit the chrysanthemums …
They are indeed, the most universal, the most diverse of flowers.” – Maeterlinck
By Karen Bergquist
“I will dance
The dance of dying days
And sleeping life.
I will dance
In cold, dead leaves
A bending, whirling human flame.
I will dance
As the Horned God rides
Across the skies.
I will dance
To the music of His hounds
Running, baying in chorus.
I will dance
With the ghosts of those
Gone before.
I will dance
Between the sleep of life
And the dream of death.
I will dance
On Samhain’s dusky eye,
I will dance.”
“At the word witch, we imagine the horrible old crones from Macbeth.
But the cruel trials witches suffered teach us the opposite.
Many perished precisely because they were young and beautiful.”
— André Breton
“Looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
An thinking of the days that are no more.
– Alfred Lord Tennyson
Autumn Dreams
Mortimer Crane Brown
“I know the year is dying,
Soon the summer will be dead.
I can trace it in the flying
Of the black crows overhead;
I can hear it in the rustle
Of the dead leaves as I pass,
And the south wind’s plaintive sighing
Through the dry and withered grass.
Ah, ’tis then I love to wander,
Wander idly and alone,
Listening to the solemn music
Of sweet nature’s undertone;
Wrapt in thoughts I cannot utter,
Dreams my tongue cannot express,
Dreams that match the autumn’s sadness
In their longing tenderness.”
“Autumn is marching on: even the scarecrows are wearing dead leaves.”
– Otsuyu Nakagawa
The Glass Door
– Henrik Nordbrandt,
Translated by Thomas Satterlee
“Like someone who opens a door of glass
or sees his own reflection in it
when he returns from the woods
the light falls so variously here at the end of October
that nothing is whole or can be made into a whole
because the cracks are too uncertain and constantly moving.
Then you experience the miracle
of entering into yourself like a diamond
in glass, enjoying its own fragility
when the storm carries everything else away
including the memory of a freckled girlfriend
out over the bluing lake hidden behind the bare hills.”
Maverick Mist 