Mid-Autumn (Moon) Festival celebrations in Victoria Park, Hong Kong, China
Autumn has officially arrived, courtesy of the yearly equinox (twindred phenomenon to the vernal equinox of Spring). I speak of course of the actual season, not of the figurative "autumn" of our lives, discussed recently on the blog, which came to visit all of us a while ago, I believe. Of course, as far as I am concerned, Fall really begins the day after Labor Day ... always has ... various calendars and lunar/solar calculations notwithstanding.
Just preceding the 'nox we enjoyed a wonderful heraldic spell of Fall weather ... soft, cool mornings, pleasant afternoons suffused with a sweet, golden light, the full Harvest Moon brilliant and pregnant with promise in a clear sky on September 15, foreshadowing the bright Hunter's Moon on October 14 and the Beaver Moon (!) of November 13, before the advent of Winter and the Cold Moon which will rise in snow-white splendor on December 12.
Perhaps it is my retro-pagan nature (and being occasionally under the influence of Guinevere the Druid Goddess, about whom more later) but the Fall moons have always been the most beautiful to me ... ascending like round orange flame, then paling to polished translucent alabaster as they climb, seemingly close enough to reach out and touch, so clear and distinct, haunting and enchanting.
The philosopher Matsuo Basho wrote of
the moon so pure
that a wandering monk
carries it across the sand
BTW ... I have always seen a "Woman in the Moon" rather than a man ... a delicate profile of a lady, as if carved on yellow onyx or tangerine soapstone. Oh, I can tilt my head and look at the moon another way and see the "Man" of legend, but the first image I see is that of a woman. Interestingly, the idea of a "Woman in the Moon" is not particularly common to European cultures, but is found primarily in the lore of Asia, Polynesia and Native Americans.
The Esquimaux tell the tale of a great magician who ascended to the heavens and became the sun, taking with him his beautiful lady. However, the lady eventually angered the magician sun (probably deemed by him as being too "uppity"), who then burned one side of her face with his fire to punish her, leaving her disfigured. The lady, not without powers of her own, fled and became the moon. The sun has been in pursuit of her ever since ... but even though he sometimes comes near, he will never overtake her. When the moon is new, the burnt side of her face is toward the Earth; when the moon is full, the reverse is true.
The Chinese celebrate Chang'e, the Goddess of the Palace of the Moon, their counterpart to the Western notion of the Man in the Moon. Although there are so many variations to the story that it can become overwhelming, briefly: Chang'e was the beautiful wife of Houyi, a loyal servant of the Emperor who, for services rendered, was given a pill that would make him immortal. Unfortunately, before he could take the pill, Chang'e found it and took it, and then floated weightlessly up to the sky, where she landed on the moon, the home of the Jade Rabbit, who became her companion.
It is said that Houyi grieved so for his lost wife that the Jade Emperor in Heaven granted him the boon of allowing him to ascend to become the sun, and so Chang'e and Houyi became the visible symbols of the concept of yin-yang (陰陽), a unity of opposites according to the Taiji ... two opposing but complementary aspects in diametric equilibrium. Yin-yang is a philosophy of duality. (As an example, winter and summer would represent the yin-yang of the year. It is interesting to note that in yin-yang metaphysical thought, the ideas of "good" and "evil" do not apply ... darkness is neither good nor bad ... it is "good" if one is trying to sleep, but "bad" if one wants to read.)
There is also an old folk legend that the Woman in the Moon is Mary Magdalene and the "spots" around her are her tears. But I digress....
Saturday I went to the Farmers' Market here after a lovely al fresco breakfast, a favorite thing to do on weekends, particularly in the cooler weather of Fall, and just enjoyed walking among the stalls with their wonderful fresh produce. Of course there was a plethora of colorful seasonal gourds including huge pumpkins, and fabulous butternut and other squash, profuse crowns of broccoli, fat juicy peaches ... a cascade of colors in variegated shades of green and yellow and gold and magenta and orange. I happily loaded up the car with the bounty, including wonderful organic locally raised chickens and grass-fed beef (I prefer to be a locavore whenever possible) and then came home and prepared a ragout ... the first of the substantial fall and winter soups that Yahn and I so love. I feel a pot of chili comin' on soon ... and a great beef brisket, slow cooked and falling apart when touched by the fork, perhaps for the Cowboys' game next weekend with Washington (mega-mega rivals ... boo 'Skins!).
And how about the 'boys' first ever victory yesterday at Lambeau Field against the Packers??? Yee-haaa!!! I guess you can take the girl out of Dallas ... and sometimes put her back ... but the Cowboys go on and on ... with a small tear in memory of the great Tom Landry.... Fall of course denotes the return of football (fu'ball, as I called it in an old As You Like It column waaaaaay back in the CHS day) ... Friday Night Lights, and Saturday afternoon and night college games, and all the Pro games, creatively scheduled whenever the networks think they might make a buck.... But again I digress....
Although Yahn had breakfast with me, we felt the trek to Farmers' Market might be too much for him, so I was accompanied by our new little baby ... Joss the Morkie, so-called because he is a Maltese-Yorkshire mix. Joss (Chinese for "luck") came to us through our good friend Chris Watts at Petropolitan, who sent us pictures and told us the little guy was in need of rescuing. Even though we were still grieving our baby Noah, we were so taken by the pictures that we adopted Joss right away ... and he is already enriching our lives with his sweet nature and unstinting love. Noah would approve, and he and Joss would have been great friends, I feel sure. Joss has his own little bed and "blankie" ... but he is particularly fond of snuggling up to Yahn when Yahn is sleeping. I sense a great relationship here ... like the one I was fortunate enough to have with Noah....
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| Joss the Morkie |
There is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky
Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!
And I believe author Hal Borland caught the feel, and feeling, of autumn when he penned:
Autumn is the eternal corrective. It is ripeness and color and a time of maturity, but it is also breadth, and depth, and distance. What man can stand with autumn on a hilltop and fail to see the span of his world and the meaning of the rolling hills that reach to the far horizon?
Personification of Autumn, Currier & Ives Lithograph (1871)
Between engagements, Guinevere the Druid Goddess sent a note in fire-writing (tricky to open), in response to my wishes to her for a glorious equinox and my inquiry regarding the egg-balancing tradition:
Still, we must observe the traditions ... so many traditions ... so little time....
Poo ... (hic! hic!) ... Poof!!!!
A joyous first day (and all the rest) of Fall to all....
)O(
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5 comments:
Ah Jennifer,
Once again it is indeed that time of the year. Autumn brings so many wonderful feeling and memories that I never know where to begin. As I said before in a previous post about autumn, I begin to feel and smell its return weeks before it comes. I can hardly wait until I have dragged down from the attic all the fall decorations--pumpkins, leaves, fall flowers, and even a touch of Halloween. Much like Christmas each item is like an old friend that comes to visit for a while. I can sit and admire and enjoy its time in our house.
While I have never seen your woman in the moon, I do love the sight of a harvest moon. We had one last week and a neighbor pulled me out to see it as it climbed its way over the tree tops. It really was a thing of beauty. I am a collector of children's books that speak to me through holiday topics(especially Christmas)and fabulous illustrations. One that I am enjoying now is called "Hello Harvest Moon" by Ralph Fletcher. I love reading it and I love displaying it on my table:
"It comes up round, ripe, and huge
over autumn fields of corn and wheat.
Hello, harvest moon.
With silent slippers
it climbs the night stairs,
lifting free of the treetops
to start working its magic,
staining earth and sky with a ghostly glow."
As you pointed out, autumn really is a season for being outside. I envy your nearness to the Farmers Market. Joss is so cute and it makes me happy that you and Yahn have him and he has you. Yes, I feel certain that Noah would approve.
With fall weather, even I find myself tempted to go to football games on occasion when the weather is "just right." Like a child, I even love tromping through crunchy leaves. Jim has planted so many trees in our yard that finally we have our own show of changing colors and tiny acorns to pick up. In a fit of madness, I even sort of promised Jim that in the fall, I might attempt to play golf one more time.
On occasion, I have even experienced a kind of melancholy during the season. I think that so much beauty can be overwhelming when I think of how briefly it lasts before winter whips it away. Perhaps it is at that moment when the first winter blasts intrudes that it brings a bit of sadness. Thankfully such unwelcome introspection doesn't last long before I am off to crunch or even rake the leaves. Best of all I love getting in the kitchen and baking cookies in all kinds of shapes--leaves, owls, bats, acorns, moons, and pumpkins. Yum! bring on the cider and the pumpkin bread.
AAAAhh, it is a lovely Autumn even if by nature, by birth, and the power of the Zodiac we Leos like the Summer. Pumpkins, falling leaves, Halloween candy, and other orange things however are lovely and deserve their praise (especially the Halloween candy...Taffy lasts forever).
Since the poet in me died years ago it is hard for me to be as elegant and lyrical as you guys. Autumn was always the end of summer, back to school, and the start of the much loved homework for me. I know my little buddy Joss loves Autumn as there is not a unsniffed or unexamined fallen leaf within a seven block radius of our house.
My hometown, Galveston, was definitely a summer place. The rest of the year except for Christmas and Easter (hollow chocolate Santas and bunnies don't you know) was just killing time waiting for the fun to come back. Splash Day (the first weekend in May and the official opening of the beaches every summer) was as important a holiday in Galveston as any other. Parades, beach front beauty contests, and pressed aluminum pirate doubloons thrown by parade float riding bathing beauties but sadly no candy! Sand - beach weather - candy they just don't mix well don't you know.
I'm sure that someone somewhere was writing poetry about the day, I never read any, and maybe that explains the lack of poetry in my soul unless you count Nat King Cole's "Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Summer". "Autumn Leaves" just never set my little toes atappin' the same way. Still every season must be appreciated for it's own special pleasures.
Sooooo in the true spirit of the season I must get busy. After all I have to get all those little chocolate dipped cherry tomatoes ready for those little trick or treaters come Halloween. I can just imagine the expressions on their little sugar crazed faces as they bite into my special little Halloween treats.
I enjoyed immensely Jennifer’s ruminations on this particular season of the year (I always learn so much neat stuff when I read her posts), and I also enjoyed Nicki’s and Yahn’s typically thoughtful and well-articulated comments. For months now it has been my distinct pleasure to visit this blog and to be entertained and educated by all that I have seen posted here. I encourage all who have contributed to this blog to keep up the wonderful work—especially since I am invariably the beneficiary of your posts and comments. While I feel that anything I might pen in response would be a fruitless attempt to gild an already beautiful lily, I would like to offer some of my own thoughts and remembrances of the autumn season.
My favorite seasons of the year have always been spring and fall, for quite obvious reasons. In the spring I delight in the appearance of new life (and hope) emerging from winter’s cold clutch; and in the fall, I experience an equally profound sense of satisfaction in observing the coming to fruition of all natural things. I must confess that at this time in my life I also prefer these particular seasons because of their moderate temperatures. As I’ve grown older, I find that I have difficulty coping with both the dizzying heat of summer and the marrow-chilling cold of winter.
I think that if I had to choose one season over the two that I prefer, it would have to be autumn. I’m not sure if this has anything to do with my being a child of autumn, a Scorpio born in November (I’d have to consult Guinevere the Druid Goddess about that); but each year when autumn arrives, I’m taken back in memory to the hardscrabble farm where I grew up north of Quail in Collingsworth County. When I think of that time, I remember first of all the smells of the season: the smell of ripe milo, the odor of pork “cracklings” and lye soap being cooked in iron pots over open fires at hog-killing time, the smell of composting leaves fallen from the trees in the thick grove where I played or hunted for quail with my dog Goober. I remember particularly the smell of burning cotton burrs at the Quail Gin where, as a child, I sat next to the pot-bellied stove in the gin office while my dad played dominoes with other farmers as they all waited for their cotton to be ginned so that the trailers could be taken back to the cotton patch to be filled again by folks pulling bolls by hand and dragging long cotton sacks behind them.. Even the smell of the “roll-yer-own” cigarettes, cigars, and pipes that the men smoked is pleasant in my recollection.
I remember, too, that Quail School used to “turn out for boll-pulling” for six weeks every fall so that the kids in school could assist in the harvesting of their family crops. We thought this was a grand thing: we could put the books aside for a whole month and a half and maybe even earn a little extra money pulling bolls (I earned precious little at that sort of “minimum wage” labor) which could then be spent for a new pair of “Christmas Levi’s,” a pair of flimsy but nonetheless cool “Hecho en Mexico” cowboy boots, a baseball glove, or some other thing a kid would normally desire but for which there was seldom sufficient “discretionary” cash in the family budget.
During these times that school was dismissed, I especially liked peanut-threshing time. Not only did this get me out of the cotton patch (because I got to drive a small Ford tractor which ferried peanuts from the thresher to a spot where the peanuts were emptied into sacks which were sewed shut with twine by my mother and grandmother), but it also allowed me to stay up until the wee hours of the morning when the dew finally called a halt to threshing for the day. During those hours, I warmed myself beside a fire made of threshed peanut vines and pleased my palate with apples baked in the hot ashes of the fire. I listened to stories my grandparents spun about the days when “life was really rough” in that part of the country, and I marveled at my good fortune at being born at a time and in a place where, as my parents asserted, the whole world was open to me and where, if I “applied myself,” I could become anything I wanted to be—even the President of the United States, as my grandmother always assured me. I never took the assurance that I could become President seriously (Even then I thought, “Who would WANT to be President anyway?”), but I most definitely did warm to the idea of the boundless freedom that stretched out before me in that long-away and far-ago time.
It would be easy at this juncture, the “autumn” of my own life, to bewail the fact that I eventually discovered that my options were far more circumscribed than my parents grandparents believed they were, but I find that I have no complaints whatsoever. I’m exactly where I belong—which is to say that I am where all my choices have led me through the 70 years of my life. I am exactly where I am supposed to be in the grand scheme of things. An examination of one’s life, which seems so appropriate to the autumn season, invariably confers a strange sense of inevitability upon the events of one’s past.
But what I must also tell you about our six-week hiatus from the classroom every fall is that the remainder of the school year was conducted sans holidays of any sort. There was no Christmas Vacation, there was no Spring Break, and there were no other sanctioned holidays throughout the remainder of the year so that we could meet the minimal attendance levels mandated by the state of Texas. You win some, you lose some—and ain’t that what life is all about after all?
AUTUMN SONG
Let’s go down the road together, you and I,
Let’s go down the road together,
Through the vivid autumn weather;
Let’s go down the road together when the red leaves fly.
Let’s go searching, searching after
Joy and mirth and love and laughter—
Let’s go down the road together, you and I.
Let’s go hunting for adventure, you and I,
For the romance we are knowing
Waits for us, alive and glowing,
For the romance that has always passed us by.
Let’s have done with tears and sighing,
What if summertime IS dying?
Let’s go hunting for adventure, you and I.
Let’s go down the road together, you and I—
And if you are frightened lest you
Weary grow, my arms will rest you,
As we take the road together when the red leaves fly.
Springtime is the time for mating?
Ah, a deeper love is waiting
Down the autumn road that calls us, you and I!
—Margaret E. Sangster
Ah Darryl ... or should I say "osensei"?
What a truly beautiful piece of writing and remembrance! I was so moved while reading your comment ... not only the lovely, evocative words you so skillfully wove together, but your facility for actually pulling the reader inside your memories ... to actually smell the ripe milo and the pork cracklings, the composting leaves and the smell of the cotton burrs burning .. to feel the warmth from that pot-bellied stove and the peanut-vine fires ... to savor a fleeting taste of those autumn apples baked in the fire's ashes.... Oh my! Your words took my breath away in places....
Needless to say, your imagery is beyond fantastic ... as is your trenchant wisdom when you speak of of the things you've learned over the course of your life, and your reflections on life itself.
No mystery here why you are the "great teacher" ... and I still the rapt student. In all your ruminations of life over the years, though, I'll bet it never crossed your mind that you would still be teaching the Class of 1963 some 45+ years down the road! But yes ... of course ... there is that "strange sense of inevitability" ... and the feeling that things are as they should be for this moment in time, in the timeless scope of the universe.
The poem is wonderful, too ... it has always been a favorite of mine and I thank you for bringing it to mind once again.
We are truly blessed to have you stop by the blog whenever you can. And I cannot thank you enough for sharing this with us ... but "thank you so very much" must suffice for a start.
Nicki and Yahn, I loved your comments as well ... as Darryl said, you both write such thoughtful, insightful, well-articulated things. The blog is doubly enriched by the posts and comments you have left, and my life is truly sweeter in the joy of sharing the journey with you.
All of you are so appreciated and loved by me, and have your own special places in my life and memory ... as well as memories to be made in all the days and years and lives to come. I am humbled yet lifted by you all....
)O(
GREAT ARTICLE!!! THE FARMER'S MARKET IS ALWAYS GREAT!!
A COUPLE OF PLACES YOU AND YAHN MAY LIKE TO VISIT: CENTRAL MARKET @ COIT AND GEORGE BUSH, IN PLANO. GREAT TO RELAX;SHOP;AND GOOD DELI. ON A SMALLER SCALE IS "SPROUTS FARMERS MARKET" WWW.SPROUTS.COM FOR LOCATIONS.
ALSO,WE RECENTLY FOUND WWW.FADISCUISINE.COM WITH 3 LOCATIONS IN DALLAS. A MEDITERRANEAN BUFFET, BUT THEY SERVE YOU. ON SUNDAY'S THEY HAVE A $14.95 BUFFET WITH ALL THE MEATS. THE ONE IN FRISCO IS JUST NORTH OF SAM MOON'S AT END OF A STRIP CENTER. SEE YA!!!
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