Tag Archives: Autumn

The 10/26/13 Joy Jar

26 Oct

The ‘Joy Jar’ exercise will end on December 25, 2013. Christmas represents birth and a new beginning. The ‘Joy Jar’ was a response to the Mayan Calendar end of the world thing. It is an exercise in counting moi’s Blessings and Being Grateful for each day. Seattle is emerging from several days of fog and the trees are a riot of color. There are leaves everywhere. The leaves are a sign of the cycle of life. Today’s deposit into the ‘Joy Jar’ is the cycle of life represented by falling leaves.

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
Albert Camus

Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in springtime.
Martin Luther

Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.
Henry David Thoreau

Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf.
Rabindranath Tagore

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.
Walt Whitman

Never say there is nothing beautiful in the world anymore. There is always something to make you wonder in the shape of a tree, the trembling of a leaf.
Albert Schweitzer

October is the fallen leaf, but it is also a wider horizon more clearly seen. It is the distant hills once more in sight, and the enduring constellations above them once again.
Hal Borland

One of the great lessons the fall of the leaf teaches, is this: do your work well and then be ready to depart when God shall call.
Tryon Edwards

The ‘Joy Jar’ exercise will end on December 25, 2013. Christmas represents birth and a new beginning. The ‘Joy Jar’ was a response to the Mayan Calendar end of the world thing. It is an exercise in counting moi’s Blessings and Being Grateful for each day. Seattle is emerging from several days of fog and the trees are a riot of color. There are leaves everywhere. The leaves are a sign of the cycle of life. Today’s deposit into the ‘Joy Jar’ is the cycle of life represented by falling leaves.

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
Albert Camus

Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in springtime.
Martin Luther

Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.
Henry David Thoreau

Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf.
Rabindranath Tagore

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.
Walt Whitman

Never say there is nothing beautiful in the world anymore. There is always something to make you wonder in the shape of a tree, the trembling of a leaf.
Albert Schweitzer

October is the fallen leaf, but it is also a wider horizon more clearly seen. It is the distant hills once more in sight, and the enduring constellations above them once again.
Hal Borland

One of the great lessons the fall of the leaf teaches, is this: do your work well and then be ready to depart when God shall call.
Tryon Edwards

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The 10/06/13 Joy Jar

6 Oct

“Autumn carries more gold in its pocket than all the other seasons.”
Jim Bishop

“With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. This was the only truly sad time in Paris because it was unnatural. You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.

In those days, though, the spring always came finally but it was frightening that it had nearly failed.”
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“Two sounds of autumn are unmistakable…the hurrying rustle of crisp leaves blown along the street…by a gusty wind, and the gabble of a flock of migrating geese.”
Hal Borland

“The leaves fall, the wind blows, and the farm country slowly changes from the summer cottons into its winter woods.”
Henry Beston

“The tints of autumn…a mighty flower garden blossoming under the spell of the enchanter, frost.”
John Greenleaf Whittier

“I saw old Autumn in the misty morn
Stand shadowless like silence, listening
To silence, for no lonely bird would sing
Into his hollow ear from woods forlorn,
Nor lowly hedge nor solitary thorn; —
Shaking his languid locks all dewy bright
With tangled gossamer that fell by night,
Pearling his coronet of golden corn.”
Thomas Hood

“But you can’t plead with autumn. No. The midnight wind stalked through the woods, hooted to frighten you, swept everything away for the approaching winter, whirled the leaves. (“The North”)”
Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

“Fall colors are funny. They’re so bright and intense and beautiful. It’s like nature is trying to fill you up with color, to saturate you so you can stockpile it before winter turns everything muted and dreary.”
Siobhan Vivian, Same Difference

“Love the trees until their leaves fall off, then encourage them to try again next year.”
Chad Sugg

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The 10/05/13 Joy Jar

5 Oct

Today is a fabulous Fall day in Seattle. The sun is shining and there is a bit of underlying chill in the air. Passed by a building and there were dozens on birds on the roof just chillin. They almost looked like they needed sunglasses, but they were cool anyway. Today’s deposit into the “Joy Jar’ is the birds chillin on the roof.

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.
C. S. Lewis

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.
Salvador Dali

Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark.
Rabindranath Tagore

A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.
Lou Holtz

I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will.
Charlotte Bronte

Be like the bird who, pausing in her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing she hath wings.
Victor Hugo

Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.
Langston Hughes

No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.
William Blake

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than to teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.
e. e. cummings

It’s best to have failure happen early in life. It wakes up the Phoenix bird in you so you rise from the ashes.
Anne Baxter

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The 09/25/13 Joy Jar

25 Sep

One always knows when it is officially autumn – when the pumpkins and mums are all over the supermarket. No matter what the calendar says Safeway, QFC, Freddies, and Albertson will tell you what time of the year it is. Today’s deposit into the ‘Joy Jar’ are pumpkins and mums.

The foliage has been losing its freshness through the month of August, and here and there a yellow leaf shows itself like the first gray hair amidst the locks of a beauty who has seen one season too many…. September is dressing herself in showy dahlias and splendid marigolds and starry zinnias. October, the extravagant sister, has ordered an immense amount of the most gorgeous forest tapestry for her grand reception.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Bittersweet October. The mellow, messy, leaf-kicking, perfect pause between the opposing miseries of summer and winter.
Carol Bishop Hipps, “October,” In a Southern Garden, 1995

Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love — that makes life and nature harmonize. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one’s very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a pefect anodyne to the restless spirit. 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, 1st October 1841

No spring nor summer’s beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one Autumnal face….
John Donne, “Elegy IX: The Autumnal”

Oh how we love pumpkin season. You did know this gourd-ish squash has its own season, right? Winter, Spring, Summer, Pumpkin…. We anxiously anticipate it every year.
Trader Joe’s Fearless Flyer, October 2010

A hidden fire burns perpetually upon the hearth of the world…. In autumn this great conflagration becomes especially manifest. Then the flame that is slowly and mysteriously consuming every green thing bursts into vivid radiance. Every blade of grass and every leaf in the woodlands is cast into the great oven of Nature; and the bright colours of their fading are literally the flames of their consuming. The golden harvest-fields are glowing in the heart of the furnace…. By this autumn fire God every year purges the floor of nature. All effete substances that have served their purpose in the old form are burnt up. Everywhere God makes sweet and clean the earth with fire. ~Hugh Macmillan

Autumn carries more gold in its pocket than all the other seasons.
Jim Bishop

October gave a party;
The leaves by hundreds came,—
The Ashes, Oaks, and Maples,
And leaves of every name.
The sunshine spread a carpet,
And every thing was grand;
Miss Weather led the dancing;
Professor Wind, the band….
The sight was like a rainbow
New-fallen from the sky….
George Cooper, “October’s Party”

Magnificent Autumn! He comes not like a pilgrim, clad in russet weeds. He comes not like a hermit, clad in gray. But he comes like a warrior, with the stain of blood upon his brazen mail. His crimson scarf is rent…. The wind…. wafts to us the odor of forest leaves, that hang wilted on the dripping branches, or drop into the stream. Their gorgeous tints are gone, as if the autumnal rains had washed them out. Orange, yellow, and scarlet, all are changed to one melancholy russet hue…. There is a melancholy and continual roar in the tops of the tall pines…. It is the funeral anthem of the dying year.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Well, it’s a marvelous night for a moondance
With the stars up above in your eyes
A fantabulous night to make romance
‘Neath the cover of October skies
And all the leaves on the trees are falling
To the sound of the breezes that blow
And I’m trying to please to the calling
Of your heartstrings that play soft and low…
Van Morrison

Of all the seasons, autumn offers the most to man and requires the least of him.
Hal Borland

O’ pumpkin pie, your time has come ’round again and I am autumnrifically happy!
Terri Guillemets

[A]utumn, that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness, that season which has drawn from every poet, worthy of being read, some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling. She occupied her mind as much as possible in such like musings and quotations…
Jane Austen

Autumn is the eternal corrective. It is ripeness and color and a time of completion; but it is also breadth, and depth, and distance. What man can stand with Autumn on a hilltop and fail to see the span of his world and the substance of the rolling hills that reach to the far horizon?
Hal Borland

Autumn is the perfect time to take account of what we’ve done, what we didn’t do, and what we’d like to do next year.
Unknown

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The 09/13/13 Joy Jar

14 Sep

The summer of 2013 in Seattle has just been grand. So, even though everyone knows that seasons change, the weather report of cooler and rainier weather next week means that Autumn is just around the corner. Today’s deposit into the ‘Joy Jar’ is the approach of Autumn.

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.”
Albert Camus

“You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.”
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”
Henry David Thoreau

“I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.”
L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“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

“Fall has always been my favorite season. The time when everything bursts with its last beauty, as if nature had been saving up all year for the grand finale.”
Lauren DeStefano, Wither

“No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face.”
John Donne

“Aprils have never meant much to me, autumns seem that season of beginning, spring.”
Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s

“Don’t you love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address.”
Nora Ephron

“At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost.”
Rainer Maria Rilke

“Autumn…the year’s last, loveliest smile.”
William Cullen Bryant

“I loved autumn, the one season of the year that God seemed to have put there just for the beauty of it.”
Lee Maynard

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