Happy first day of Fall! Today is the autumn equinox, the “scientific” start of the season, if you will. This is a piece I wrote last year. I’ve polished it up a bit and decided to share it with you all. The picture is from November of five years ago. There is no way leaves would start turning in mid-September where I live.
The autumn sun looks different than the summer sun.
The summer light is thick. It drips out of the sky and sticks to things like melted sugar that’s almost burnt.
The autumn light is thin and brittle. It blows with the wind in fractals, just cool enough to promise winter. You can get away from the autumn sun; stand under a still-leafy branch and peer out at it.
There’s a reason for this. The way the Earth orbits and the tilt of the axis. You could probably draw it on graph paper if you had time. The angle of the sun, the angle of the axis, the angle of refraction off the atmospheric particles. The same ones that make blue days run into orange twilights and purple dusks.
It would look very neat with all the typed numbers and color-coded lines.
Some people hate that sort of thing. They say it kills the magic, but it doesn’t, really. The autumn sun on the autumn leaves is no less beautiful for being graphed or studied.
If anything, it tells us that reason is part of nature. Numbers are not just ink on paper, but part of the many millions of pieces that make the structure of the world that meets our eyes.
Some need to know in order to feel. It doesn’t destroy the beauty; it forces you into it.
Maybe, too, all the scientific explanations only increase the wonder. Because that sheet of graph paper always seems just short of the whole truth.
As accurate as the graph may be, as well-mapped as our synapses become, there is something that happens between sunrays and our mind that cannot be measured. They gain something as they traverse their final, unchartable angle in our souls.
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