Perhaps spring is your time of new beginnings; autumn is mine.

It isn't new in the usual sense of things (after all, according to the plants, it's the dying of all spring brought), but it is the start of a new school year. This was ingrained from childhood, and the time will likely come when autumn doesn't bring a new semester and I'll have to re-order my scheme of seasons. All the same, at the first cool breeze and rustling of leaves, I feel the rush of aliveness, and life is irresistible.

It's possibility and motion. It's the way a brilliant blue sky stirs hope in my heart, and the restless skittering of leaves that mirrors my own restlessness so well. No day is like the one before- and how would that be, since autumn is change, the brink of winter? The leaves turn color and drop and catch the breeze until the branches are bare, the trees are skeletons, and the world has settled into winter. I love autumn for all the wonderful cozy reasons, and for its restless ever-changing beauty that my pen aches to capture. It is hard to be disillusioned in autumn.

Among the achingly beautiful are the days when the leaves turn gold against a bright blue sky, Perhaps you know the poem (especially if you've read The Outsiders) that captures the gold of spring:

"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." -Robert Frost

Looking at the golden trees on an early October day, it seems that nature's last green is gold too. Spring and autumn are marked by their fleetingness as they mark the end of one season with a sudden burst change, then tumble into another.

Once during an early morning class, my professor responded to a particularly cynical comment with "it's too early in the morning for disillusionment." He said it half earnestly, half ironically, and we all smiled. All the same, a fresh new morning does seem contrary to disillusionment, and autumn is much the same. The time when we are most alive to nature's changing beauty is not often the time to be disenchanted.

It is easier to be disillusioned in the longer seasons, when life settles into routine and sometimes weariness. In the middle of winter, I long for spring; in summer I long for autumn. But my longing is a paradox- I love these transition seasons for the change and hope they bring, but they could not be endlessly changing. They have to change into something.

Each year, autumn comes bright and beautiful, promising that things do not remain the same forever. Each year I long to hold onto the beauty- but I am learning to hold onto the truth set in seasons: that each season is beautiful and valuable in its own right, and you cannot have one without the other. There is no autumn without winter, no winter without spring, no spring without summer, and no summer that does not at last feel the cool breath of change.