A broken tulip

I meant to write about cynicism today.

But then,

Fall arrived.

Fall is an impishly unreliable season.

True Fall days, like today, are when the air bites you but the leaves warm you and you are caught in the push and pull, the cold and hot, the celebration and the loss.

How often do you watch shadows at sunrise?

This Saturday morning, shadows stretched long behind the old sentinel trees along the country roads. They  smothered two whole fields and still reached beyond into a smudge of trees far off.  

My road was lined on either side by these shadow-stretching trees. The sunrise sun caught the tops of the trees so that I traveled up a royal carpet of tarmac, lined on either sides with flames, iridescent with an eerie light. A white car ahead of me stirred the few leaves already fallen. They danced upwards so that I drove through clouds of leaves, their colour and motion reminiscent of the monarch butterflies just departed.

Every. single. day. is. different. in Fall

and it breaks my heart, every morning, in the most beautiful way.

Cynicism, according to the dictionary, is believing that the motivation behind everything (whether the motivation be divine, natural, or supernatural) is selfishness.

I had a little thought to share about cynicism, drawn in by the recent thoughts on deconstruction. When deconstruction clears a field, often cynicism is the weed that quickly grows to cover the newly dug earth.

Turns out, I never even understood what cynicism is. And today, all of Creation is letting out its pent-up colour and celebration. The earth laughs in the face of Winter.

The sun this morning was a solid red ball, hanging low. It looked as though it were turning the trees into reds and yellows simply by its own hue.

This morning, so many groups of geese winged their way over me as I worked, I lost count. Their honking to each other faded in and out of the other Fall noises. Still low in the sky, the whoosh of their wings filled the air.

As I approached the farm, one field rolling itself over and around a hill was peeking one sunflower-yellow eye open at a time, just a few flashes of a coming storm of colour, should the frost hold off long enough.

Abundance is the blue-print the Creator used when he made this world.

It’s straight in our Creation story—the sky filled with creatures, the water teeming, the earth filled, the garden planted with plenty to eat and it all was filled with beauty, with goodness. Men and women were told to represent God’s kingship over this abundance and to celebrate God, lifting his Creation back in gratitude.

“Why do you worry about what you will eat or wear,” asks the Teacher, “when the flowers and the birds are cared for and clothed? Where is your faith?”

Self-giving love, and not selfishness, is at the core of this world.

It is Christ who holds all things together—and he has shown us what giving-love truly is.

At the farm, the feast surprises me. The bounty takes my breath away – squash and pumpkins, peppers and zucchini, corn and garlic, onions and potatoes, kale and gladioli, on and on stacked so high in so many colours.

Toddlers waddle through the pumpkin patches, all bundled up, to pick the large orange globes. The goats rub noses along the fence.

There is so much. So much colour. So many shapes. So much texture. So much food. So much joy.

It reminds me of the Celtic prayer that blessed my bread-making days, something like, “It is you who sets the generous table, and we are all guests.”

So this week, instead of thinking about cynicism, I’m going to gather into my heart the abundance. Like a squirrel, scurrying to pocket nuts before Winter, I’m going to run around in the colour and sunshine we’re given this week.

Cynicism will have to wait.

Image: a fall leaf design gifted by a tree, and arranged for a friend yesterday 🙂