Casting Out of Tune: Late Fall, Over-Taken.

There is something about the Fall season that pulls on me. The cool air, strange smells,  the changing color of leaves swirling on the ground. There is an “otherness” in the air that seems to grasp at me.  

Poets understand this otherness and grasping at the soul,

“We are grasped by what we cannot grasp”. Rilke

Robert Frost felt something tugging at his soul in his walk in a yellow woods on a Fall day as he lamented a path not taken. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, sorry I could not travel both”.  

And  in another poem he describes the grasping as a pensive call to come in the woods,.

“Almost like a call to come in

To the dark and lament.”

Sometimes, the sounds of geese overhead seems to call to us. But often we are out of tune with this call, and late to respond,

“We are not in harmony, our blood does not forewarn us like migratory birds. Late, overtaken, we force ourselves abruptly onto the wind and fall to earth at some iced-over lake”. Rilke

Trying to fish on some iced-over lake late is a metaphorical indication that I might be forcing my way in life instead of being in harmony. I am abrupt rather than flowing with the seasons. I am trying to force fish to take the fly when there is no hatch. The fish are resting and recovering. Perhaps, I should let them be. Perhaps I should do the same.  I feel out of tune.

As Paul Simon wrote, “Like a poem poorly written, we are verses out of rhyme”.  Sometimes I fish like a “poem poorly written, and like a verse out of rhyme”. I am not timing my casts. I am just casting and casting aimlessly.  I’m not even sure I should be there. Perhaps, this is what I need to lament;  To know how out of tune I am.

Perhaps for me the Fall is a time to be metaphorically alone. For me, late fall no longer feels like a call to be grasping at fish but it is more a time for restless contemplation. A time to wander;

“Whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,
and wander along the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing”. Rilke

With our rivers that have been over fished all summer long, perhaps it is time to give it a rest. Time for the shadows to lay over places like the Dream Stream and Eleven Mile Canyon and Deckers.

“Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by.
Now overlap the sundials with your shadows,
and on the meadows let the wind go free”.  

Let the winds bring snow and a message on the wind that helps me be in tune with the greater "otherness" of my life.