Stevens Pass, October 2008
October is my favorite month. I like autumn generally and (here) October is the month that finds the perfect balance between summer and winter. Nature is quieting down, weather is revving up. Humans are settling some, too (at least temporarily) – school routines are set and efficient, holiday frenzies have not quite begun.
I always prefer quiet to frenzy. It’s part of my attraction to solitude.
October is also my birth month. Birthdays provide a day of license to celebrate ourselves – incorporate some self-indulgence into the schedule without apology. More importantly for me they are the annual opportunity to reflect on another trip around the sun – that pivotal personal reminder of the grand balance between the clearly temporary and seemingly eternal.
There is, apart from mere intellect, in the makeup of every superior human identity, (in its moral completeness, considered as ensemble, not for that moral alone, but for the whole being, including physique,) a wondrous something that realizes without argument, frequently without what is called education, (though I think it the goal and apex of all education deserving the name) – an intuition of the absolute balance, in time and space, of the whole of this multifarious, mad chaos of fraud, frivolity, hoggishness – this revel of fools, and incredible make-believe and general unsettledness, we call the world; a soul-sight of that divine clue and unseen thread which holds the whole congeries of things, all history and time, and all events, however trivial, however momentous, like a leashed dog in the hand of the hunter. – Walt Whitman
