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.
Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal.
Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly.
In the developed world, hundreds of millions of us now face the bizarre problem of surfeit. Yet our brains, instincts, and socialized behavior are still geared to an environment of lack. The result? Overwhelm - on an unprecedented scale.
There's a lot more hypocrisy than before. Racism has gone back underground.
There is nothing less to our credit than our neglect of the foreigner and his children, unless it be the arrogance most of us betray when we set out to "Americanize" him.
It will be remembered, that a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles is solemnly enjoined by most of the state constitutions, and particularly by our own, as a necessary safeguard against the danger of degeneracy, to which republics are liable, as well as other governments, though in a less degree than others.
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