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.
Every time somebody speaks of my honesty, there is someone who quivers inside me.
We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.
At one point, early on, some public figures even asked whether it 'made sense' to rebuild New Orleans. Would you let your own mother die because it didn't make financial sense to spend the money to treat her, or because you were too busy to spend the time to heal her sick spirit?
What do we call love, hate, charity, revenge, humanity, forgiveness? Different results of the master impulse, the necessity of securing one's self-approval.
There is no faculty of the human soul so persistent and universal as that of hatred.
The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less.
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