In the northern hemisphere, autumn has come.
Brown leaves drift down off my oak tree. My oriental lilies look as dead as a handful of chopsticks sticking out of the soil. One rose bravely blooms on.
It’s the time of year when our thoughts turn involuntarily to the coming winter. And to death.
In her Traditional Iconoclast blog, Isabel Gibson mused: “The grasses glow as October light falls sideways against their end-of-season mix of colours. Fall winds rustle their drying stalks and fronds.”
I hear echoes of a psalmist’s lament: “As for mortals,” says Psalm 103, “their lives are like grass…the wind passes over it and it is gone.”
Isabel and I have both had acquaintances die, suddenly and unexpectedly, in the last few weeks. Life seems fragile.
“As I poke bulbs into soil,” Isabel wrote, “I cannot be certain that I will see these tulips bloom…As I plant, I consider the grasses, admiring their fall colours, even enjoying the gentle death rattle made by their stalks and the wind. Whenever it comes, I hope that I will slide into my own inevitable winter as beautifully, as peacefully, as rightly, somehow.”
But perhaps grass is not the best metaphor for life and death. Because grass goes brown, but it does not die. It looks dead under the burning summer sun, or under winter’s bitter frosts. But when weather changes, when the rains return, the grass springs up once more, lush and green.
Tulips and lilies and oak trees do not die in winter either. They simply hibernate. So their greening again next spring is not really a resurrection.
Perhaps that’s why we like to use them as a figure of speech. Because their “resurrection” implies that perhaps death is not the end for us, either.
Annuals might offer us a more valid metaphor. Because annuals really do die. They bloom their little hearts out during summer, brightening the earth with colour and fragrance. And then they die. And they cannot know—assuming plants are capable of knowing anything—whether the seeds they leave behind will produce new flowers next spring, or will disappear.
Just like us.
We don’t like to think that when we’re gone, we’re gone. Death is not just a period of dormancy. When we “slide into our inevitable winter,” as Isabel put it, we don’t come back in spring. Maybe there’s a heaven; maybe there’s re-incarnation. But both of those will be in a different garden.
We don’t pop up again, like sliced bread in a toaster.
And if we have trouble accepting our own death, we are petrified by the possible death of our cherished institutions and organizations. We almost dare not imagine the death of our churches, for example, even though we claim to believe in a life after death. We know our churches must change. But we want to know how they will be re-born before we’re willing to let go of their current incarnation.
We fear that the seeds we have scattered will not take root and bloom, after we’re gone. Instead, we want to preserve our plants in an artificial hot-house, just in case.
We should learn from those annuals.
