Evening benediction
I. Autumn
“You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring…”
~ Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
“You see, one loves the sunset when one is so sad.”
~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
Autumn is the season when it begins. The nights lengthen, the days become cold and crisp, the leaves blaze bright and then fall, thousands of tiny losses crunching under your feet. In the same way, depression comes both suddenly and slowly – one day your heart fills with joy at the bright orange maple trees, the next they might as well be wet-cement-gray for all the power they have to stir emotion out of your dull, heavy heart. Depression comes, sometimes literally in the autumn as our bodies react to the fading light with seasonal affective disorder, but sometimes it comes in the middle of the summer, when everyone else seems to be outside in the sunshine, laughing, running, playing, while inside your mind the sun has set and the shadows have lengthened and taken over.
Autumn is my favorite season, even though winter is always hard. I wonder how much the beauty of the fall is enhanced by the knowledge that soon things will get hard, that soon life will be heavier. Some winters are harder than others, but you don’t know what kind of year it will be when the first frost tinges the morning grass. You only know that your heart is saying goodbye to a certain light and lightness, that you won’t see again for a long time. You know, too, that spring will come, that warmth and joy will return. But in between is winter, that long night of the earth, that long night of the soul.
Don’t worry, reader. We’ll walk through it together.
From Blessings for the Long Night: Poems and Meditations to Help You through Depression, available wherever books are sold