Autumn is a mysterious season. I once said to a friend that it was as though the leaves, which had been made of light through the alchemical magic of chlorophyll, were now giving it back, shining like small flames on the (mostly northern hemisphere) trees. ‘How can that be?’ he asked sharply, and I stayed quiet, an awkward and shy poet who had no rational explanation for the obvious.
Children have no trouble with mystery. An apricot is a golden sun-ball, a fallen autumn leaf is a little piece of that sunset. And we are well advised to enter into their world, through a re-awakening of that most childlike quality — wonder. So each autumn I will return to this faculty for seeing the world of nature in a renewed way, for this is the time to gaze at the world and be amazed. But it is to gaze, not glance, that we are called. The world gives over its mysteries gradually. We have to develop what John Keats called, in a letter to his brothers, Negative Capability — that is, to be ‘capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ There is nothing negative in this, but it does require the capability to inhabit — initially — a field of apparent nothingness. So easy for a child, because for a child this field is teeming with presence. But for adult consciousness, there is a gap, which we have filled with theories — perhaps some of those promulgated by Richard Dawkins.
Rachel Carson, author of ‘Silent Spring’ and wonderful books about the sea, has commented: ‘If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder . . . he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, the excitement and mystery of the world we live in.’ An adult courageous enough to hold open the intellectual window of the mind and let being-ness and presence in…
