"This is a changing world, my dear..."

"This is a changing world my dear - new songs are sung, new stars appear; though we grow older year by year, our hearts can still be gay." - Noel Coward

The other morning I awoke to find the world wrapped in a thick autumn mist. As the day wore on, it gradually lifted from over the garden to reveal late roses still heavy with dew; above the pine tree, the thick white covering played hide-and-seek with a weak blue sky; and beyond the hedge the field remained invisible beneath its blanket.

"I tell you the truth, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies it produces many seeds." John 12: 24                                                                     

Magdalen College, Oxford

Usually October is a month of constant change - a chance for nature to adjust gradually from summer to autumn. This year however it remained late summer for weeks and weeks until, all at once, the leaves changed colour and started falling to the ground, where they lie growing in piles of firey orange and bronze, just waiting to be gleefully kicked and scattered by ecstatic children.

As the spidery sprays of bare twigs begin to appear silhouetted against the sky, which itself seems to sink lower above the rooftops - and as the evenings steadily close in, I feel as though the world is dying. Of course, I know it will come alive again in the spring, but that doesn't stop the sadness now: nature is in mourning.

I think the seasons are rather like the cycle of a butterfly, with autumn being the time when the caterpillar begins to build itself the chrysalis of winter; sometimes, what looks like death is just the beginning of greater life...