So there you go. It’s legally autumn, or so they say. It’s the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. It’s the time when you want to curl up with a good book under a tree which strategically sheds its leave son you at all the right times, and get wrapped up in the fleeting moods and shifting scenarios which only this season can legitimize.
You want to wrap your hands around a coffee cup until the warmth spills over, and then radiate outwards like the sunshine is radiating with a cool, mellow touch. It’s almost therapeutic. It’s magic at its best. It’s love which has been given another name, love which becomes all colours and butterflies and hues which are crimson and gray. Autumn is not everyone’s cup of tea, but to me, it is so much richer than spring. It is the season, to me, when endings seem fleeting and beginnings seem endless. Who can’t envision rich possibilities when drunk on the stupor of so much beauty? The rich foliage only adds to the mood, sets it into this tizzy of furtive delights.
Autumn is not just drifting leaves and mellow touch; it’s the season when you realize beauty lies in all the small things. You visit a coffee shop and surrender yourself to the charms around you, watching young couples canoodling and girls wearing mufflers and pretty scarves of various colours. Summer has faded, and autumn is the season when leaves themselves seem to embody hues which are delectable. This season is not uni-dimensional like summer or winter. There is magic hypnotized and spread like wildfire, if you just care to notice. The small sparks tend to fly faster and higher in this season. They can add up and make your life a blissful, blissful whole, tinged with joys which are not merely seasonal, but flung around an abyss of self-discovery, strength, and contingent on enthusiasm and energy.
You feel blessed in so many ways during this season. Life slows down in the right places, and there is this feeling of warmth and contentment, drenched in shades of gratefulness, and topped off by this sheer joy of being alive. The feeling of being alive is accentuated by the myths which this season unfolds, like a series of fairytales which are present right before your eye, and which always promise happy endings. Though this may not actually be the case, autumn is all about being on the slope of happiness, and the feel is not at all unpleasant.
This is the season I am more into my hobbies like reading and writing. I am no longer stagnant, but alive with the possibilities of filling my notebooks and my laptop with words that empower, cripple, and spill over with feelings and emotions of various kinds. My words are no longer accompaniments to my mood, but mould my mood. I am raining words down in my notebooks, filling them up, and letting them form meaning for me. I can close my eyes and see the way my coffee, with its little leaf drawn in milk in the center, is poured all the way up to the very edge of my mug, almost spilling over but never quite doing it.
The barista smiles at me, whilst drawing on the coffee cup a design-shaped heart which touches hearts and makes them smile. This is his craft, after all. Coffee-making is its own art, its own soul. It is the epic feeling of being owned, of contributing, of being part of something larger than oneself. Coffee and autumn go well together. They match somehow. They both promise mobility and growth. It is a season of not-quites and just-abouts, but when you look at the trees in their most pristine moment of red-gold-orange glory, there is something about it that is incredibly fulfilled. Though it brings with it the promise of increasingly unmanageable coldness, and the longest months of bare, twisted trees, it is the pause just before the leap where you realize how beautiful all the things are that you are about to lose. There is not a day that goes by in autumn where you don’t want to reach out and grab everything you are seeing, preserve the moments of grounded leaves blowing in the wind or the kind of sunny day that still requires you to wear a light jacket and scarf. You want to keep it, and you can’t, and maybe that’s the best part.