Passions & Pastimes April Eileen Passions & Pastimes April Eileen

Quotes from the Classics: October

Ohio is an autumn postcard, a veritable cliché of colored leaves, pumpkin patches, and cinnamon donuts with warm apple cider. There is a chill in the air that makes a hoodie extra special, whether it be worn on a hayride, through a corn maze, or shielding against intermittent snow flurries, depending on the year. Welcome, October!

Ohio is an autumn postcard, a veritable cliché of colored leaves, pumpkin patches, and cinnamon donuts with warm apple cider. There is a chill in the air that makes a hoodie extra special, whether it be worn on a hayride, through a corn maze, or shielding against intermittent snow flurries, depending on the year. Welcome, October!

If you tune in right now, the Earth is unearthing herself. The cooling air has less moisture, less vapor, and fewer clouds, the sun casting its final few warm rays from a seat of brilliant blue. Animals scurry about in pursuit of basic food and shelter, the essential becoming apparent. The leaves remove their cloaks of green and the trees now don their favorite colors. There is enough light, seeming to shine on rather than through things, to reveal all as it is for just a moment before everything pares back to pure essence. The veil is thin, as those now honoring ancestors and remembering they are part of a story much larger than themselves, would share. Everything is honest. Everything is gorgeous. And there is perspective to be had.

Fall trees by Pixabay


Who are we? Who are we really? What is true? So true that it puts what is not in relief? And what is not ours, not us? Sense yourself and hold on devotedly, cut what’s misaligned, and let it fall away in the cool autumn breeze. I believe the season will support it. Now is the time to see we are not our flaws or our failures or the 1,001 iterations of fear we harbor (the psychologically systemic kind, not the running from lions kind). Rather, we are the beautiful humans having them, able to move toward the Light because of them, ever becoming more of who we are meant to be. And isn’t that really the goal? We are colors of Love, the hurts healed by our brilliance, the pain soothed by our beauty, the world painted with more peace. The trees have already revealed their favorite colors? What’s yours?


Check out these quotes from the classics that speak to all things October. Enjoy!

 
Every leaf speaks bliss to me
Fluttering from the autumn tree.
— Emily Bronte, Fall, leaves, fall
 

 
It’s the first day of autumn! A time of hot chocolatey mornings, and toasty marshmallow evenings, and, best of all, leaping into leaves!
— Winnie the Pooh, Pooh's Grand Adventure
 

 
The day becomes more solemn and serene
When noon is past; there is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,
Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!
— Percy Shelley, Hymn to Intellectual Beauty
 

 
Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love - that makes life and nature harmonise... Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the Earth seeking the successive autumns.
— George Eliot, Letter to Miss Lewis, October 1, 1841
 

 
Only lovers
see the fall
a signal end to endings
a gruffish gesture alerting
those who will not be alarmed
that we begin to stop
in order to begin
again.
— Maya Angelou, Late October
 

 
There is no season when such pleasant and sunny spots may be lighted on, and produce so pleasant an effect on the feelings, as now in October
— Nathaniel Hawthorne, The American Notebooks: The Centenary Edition
 

 
I just want to live in a world of mountains, coffee, campfires, cabins and golden trees, and run around with a camera and notebook, learning the inner workings go everything real.
— Victoria Erickson, Rhythm and Roads
 

Love in all things,

April Eileen

P.S. Alright, I just really dig Victoria Erickson and her absolutely beautiful writing. Can we say modern classic?

 
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