Autumn

The crickets sang . . . the song of summer’s ending.²⁶ 

_The dawning of autumn and the year’s maturing elicit in us deep emotions and elusive longings that rise like mists. In autumn, “deep calls to deep” (Ps. 42:7). There’s a pensive air in autumn that woos us, stirs us into knowing there’s something beyond our brittle days. In Wilbur’s life, the cricket’s song signals the time of decision. Autumn is a season for considering mortality. As White wrote, “Everybody heard the song of the crickets.”²⁷ 

Matt Cardin, author of the blog The Teeming Brain, examines the feeling autumn elicits: 

This autumnal mood is inextricably bound up with a certain, strange longing . . . it is always characterized by a kind of nostalgia for something I have never really known, as if I possess some vestigial memory of a lost knowledge or emotion that flits maddeningly and elusively on the edge of my ability to recall directly . . . It’s an experience that makes me feel as if I’ve come into brief contact with some sort of transcendent spiritual truth. It tends to generate the impression of an absolute, unmediated experience of supernal beauty hovering just beyond the edge of my inner grasp. All the flickering hints of this beauty that I sometimes encounter in literature . . . seem to reach their apotheosis in this ungraspable ultimacy, as if they are merely finite carriers that filter and refract partial glimpses of an infinite reality.” ²⁸ 

Beatrice Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin, a winsome autumnal tale, wooed C. S. Lewis into this same sense. Its conveyance of the essence of autumn gave Lewis a deeper longing for something beyond himself. Lewis describes it as “that unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of a bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, . . . the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves.”²⁹ 

Prayer: Father, please fill my autumn wistfulness within the deep caverns in my spirit, with You.