All through autumn we hear a double voice: one says everything is ripe; the other says everything is dying. The paradox is exquisite. We feel what the Japanese call "aware"--an almost untranslatable word meaning something like "beauty tinged with sadness.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the duality of life, illustrating the beauty found in the interplay of life and death.
Gretel Ehrlich's quote captures the essence of autumn as a season of contrasts, where we are reminded of the cyclical nature of life. It emphasizes the simultaneous existence of ripeness and decay, inviting us to appreciate the beauty found in sadness, an idea encapsulated in the Japanese concept of 'aware.' This profound awareness urges us to embrace the dualities of existence, recognizing that beauty is often intertwined with melancholy.
In practice
In a speech about the changing seasons, to highlight how life is a blend of beauty and impermanence.
Love life first, then march through the gates of each season; go inside nature and develop the discipline to stop destructive behavior; learn tenderness toward experience, then make decisions based on creating biological wealth that includes all people, animals, cultures, currencies, languages, and the living things as yet undiscovered; listen to the truth the land will tell you; act accordingly.
The toughness I was learning was not a martyred doggedness, a dumb heroism, but the art of accommodation. I thought: to be tough is to be fragile; to be tender is to be truly fierce.
Animals give us their constant, unjaded faces, and we burden them with our bodies and civilized ordeals.
Autumn teaches us that fruition is also death; that ripeness is a form of decay. The willows, having stood for so long near water, begin to rust. Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons.
The despondency that follows makes me feel somewhat like a shipwrecked man who spies a sail, sees himself saved, and suddenly remembers that the lens of his spyglass has a flaw, a blurred spot -- the sail he has seen.
Live and die without prayer, and you will pray long enough when you get to hell.
All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static.
Anarchism...stands for direct action, the open defiance of, and resistance to, all laws and restrictions, economic, social, and moral.
Why don't they cut their own children's ears into points to make them look sharp? Why don't they cut off their noses to make them look plucky? One would be just as sensible as the other. What right have they to torment and disfigure God's creatures?
Comic books, movies, radio programmes centered their entertainment around the fact of torture. With the clearest of consciences, with a patriotic intensity, children dreamed, talked, acted orgies of physical abuse. Imaginations were released to wander on a reconnaissance mission from Cavalry to Dachau. European children starved and watched their parents scheme and die. Here we grew up with toy whips. Early warning against our future leaders, the war babies.
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