Passings

This is the season of passing.

A chill is in the air. A sense of life ebbing. Summer’s lush green withers, crumbles; stiffened with frost then left limp in cold sunlight. They say it’s the end of the growing season, but all growing things, at least those well fitted to this climate, had long since reached their lush ripeness. Full maturity well precedes the first frost. A full life is not cut short by death.

This is the season of passing. Passing celebrated with a burst of great beauty. The gloried culmination of exuberant seasons of life and growth. A final flowering of unsurpassed splendor. It is a season of appreciation. Each golden afternoon treasured for the knowledge that such afternoons are numbered and each warrants a special savoring. In their dying the unnoticed leaves of June and July become objects of marvel and pilgrimage. The ever hastening sunsets bring urgency to the day. Time is passing. Passing quickly.

And as the days shorten we shiver at the prospect of a world gone to seed … and therein lies a great irony, and, perhaps, a profound lesson.

The sweet promise of our spring, the great purpose of our lush and rampant summer blossoming is ultimately to go to seed. The farmer plants and cultivates, glorying in growth and promise, but it is the harvest that he truly celebrates. It is in that final act of a life grown and nurtured, embryo through maturity, that life itself is allowed to defy the icy, lifeless grip of an inescapable winter.

So amid the season’s brilliant colors and bountiful harvest is the haunted awareness of the needfulness of dying. Death is the destiny of life, the necessary making room for what is to come. In death we recognize the seeds of new life.

For as winter follows fall, spring follows winter, and it is the harvest of this season, this season of passing, that sustains us through those bleak and lifeless days and gives the seed that, in its time, will replenish our world. It is a good life that passes on seed to renew the world.

This was the season of my dad’s passing. For little more than five years short of a century he flourished, outliving trees and outlasting styles, trends and technologies. I knew him all my life, in ways that changed with the seasons and grew deeper with time. With Mom he was my first teacher, though probably not my last, and no doubt I’ve passed his lessons on to some whose lives I have touched.

It was his very living that was his lesson, a curriculum sustained through success and hardship; the seeds of a life lived with wisdom, love and kindness.

And what did he pass on from that near-century of growing? Simple and straightforward: It’s better to smile than to frown. It’s better to celebrate than to mourn. It’s better to be at peace than to anger. The burden of resentment isn’t worth carrying and a good meal and a good party are always good ideas. If fun isn’t a sacrament, it ought to be.

And when you’re in darkness, never forget the beauty of the sunset and keep faith that the dawn and a new and wonderful day will be coming soon. It always does.

Thanks, Dad. Gonna miss you.