Autumn Memories
Seasons are passing by. Another summer is slowly transitioning into winter, and squeezed in between, is autumn. One can feel the slight chill in the air and hints of winter months waiting just around the corner.
And in six more months, it will be four years since I have been to India. Thanks to Covid, the normal progression of events has been on hold since 2020.
If I was in India, this would have been the time to take quilts (razai) out from their storage, where they have been slumbering through the months of brutish summer, and afterwards, through the humid months of monsoon, and spread them out in the October sun.
Each year, no matter what corner of the world I am in, during this time of transition from summer to winter, the childhood memories of those quilts spread under the sun return. In my mind’s eye, I can see my face buried into their soft warmth and taking in the aroma of naphthalene balls that were put inside to keep cotton eating bugs away.
That aroma, the warmth of soft quilts on my face, and the touch of a friendlier autumn sun after the long summer, was also a secret message from the universe. There was a feeling within that there is something more to autumn than meets the eye. I was too young to know then but those moments were a subtle reminder of my finititude.
But eventually, we do become aware that immersed in the expansiveness of space and time, we are just a blip, and the realization gets harder to ignore. For some, it becomes an ungluing experience, for others, it is some just moments of meh. Perhaps, this divergence in perceptions is an outcome of chemicals in our brains; the efficacy of serotonin and dopamine pathways differs between people.
The sense of our finiteness within the spaciousness of space and time, and trying to resolve the dissonance it creates, has spun off innumerable philosophical traditions. It has spawned religions for us to seek solace from our finiteness. It has fathered nirvana, hell and heaven, reincarnation, and the desire for universal connectedness.
For me, perhaps the resolution from my finititude is that the atoms in this body are a product of billions of years of cosmic evolution, and the same atoms will continue to be there for another billion years to become the part of many many many forms that are yet to come.
Perhaps, recycling the constituents of my body into a future tree, or another living being, a raindrop falling from the sky, or the air someone would breathe million years from now, is my reincarnation, and my redemption from the finititude.
Perhaps.
Autumn is a beautiful, magical, and a nostalgic time of the year. The change in color of leaves, the feel of slight chill in the air, and if I am in India, the time of festivals of Dussehra and Diwali, brings a desire to take it easy and savor life.
Autumn is the time of the year to start slowing down and get ready for the introspection that winter brings.
And obviously, it is time to bring out the quilts and bury my face in their soft warmth under the sun and take in the aroma of naphthalene.
Someday soon, I would land in New Delhi once more, but until then
It is time again
for autumn rites -
let quilts be free;
feel the ache
of another year
on the verge to say bye;
sense the impermanence
in fallen leaves;
and hear geese cackle adieu
before south they fly.
Ciao.
