Autumn

When I was young I never trusted Autumn. She was beautiful, enrapturing, excessive in the final bow before winter’s curtain fell. People were swept up in her beauty and the cozy rituals accompanying the season’s change, but I couldn’t fall in love knowing that in the end, love would leave… it felt bittersweet at best, at a betrayal at worst. 

In difficult seasons of life I feel the need to process my personal life and sort out my inner dialogue through an outward visuals. It’s not because I want others to know what I’m experiencing, it’s because I crave a perspective shift from hyper-internal to obviously laid out.  This year I felt drawn to see myself within a seasonal narrative as I transitioned through something big. Bounty and loss, love and lust, dreams and nightmares all wrapped up in another familiar transition– Autumn exchanging for winter. 

When I first began, I translated her departure as an abandonment- a let down to all the ones that loved her, celebrated her, and trusted her, for a lover that would change her into something she’d never been. A lover she would willingly give herself for. 

But by the time the project was finished the narrative had shifted slightly… the voice sounded similar, but the same story had something else to say. It’s so important to listen to your work; creating isn’t just about telling a thing what it is. Stories are like children, they grow in the dark, the quiet, the small, the hushed, and you dream of what they might be once they’re in a big wide world. Once you finally stare eye to eye, you realize they are so much more than dreams could have held…  more complex, more deep, innocent in their own way, yet wise before they even know it. As they grow, they may not choose the path you paved for them, they may be hard to wrangle and difficult to listen to, but they become their own being and in the end, teach you more than anticipated. 

Autumn was a vision in my head that I carried for years, but when she was finally born and staring back at me, I realized that I had in fact read her wrong. She didn’t foolishly fall for a beastly figure, loosing all that she once knew to a ghostly frigid night. Winter was not coming for her at all, and when I listened to how the story really went, I discovered that my life was not what I interpreted at first after all. Not as simple, not as light, and yet somehow not as dark. Autumn and I, we found another piece of ourselves, but not from a lover, simply because of. 

Autumn- child of plenty grown in warm summer sunlight; now bursting at the seams. Beauty, bounty, bliss for all who catch her eye.

Sharing happiness found simply in herself.

We always wondered why she ran away with winter… what on earth could a beast like him offer that she did not already have?

Slipping away— tones changing, hues dipping, an unraveling of all she was known for in exchange for what? A lover’s bed? Where was he— this grand winter? Never seen but always spoken of… A mystical beast of inescapable seduction that dared not show his own haunting face.

She had run away seemingly in love, or at least, full of love. Yet her hands were empty, ever grasping at the future… A lonely, cold, perceptive future.

And with one swift realization it became quite obvious— winter was never charging in from the north.

Winter was within.

A lover, a fighter, in battle with oneself. A shifting season, a reason to explore purely out of choice and find

Beauty

Bounty

Bliss

In a snow capped landscape of the same bloody heart. Always falling— in deed a great fall

in love.