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As a native of a small, overcrowded, congested, tarmacked and irritable island the great
spaces of the Americas have always been for me a relief and a source of revelation, places to
breathe in. During the Autumn in Eastern Canada the edges of the wilderness become
impossibly, almost tastelessly beautiful as the trees silently turn into waving rivers of scarlet,
chrome yellows, dark gold and rich brown. Mountain after mountain the cry becomes a chorus,
a demonstration for some intense but mysterious cause. They seem to be making a last
desperate statement, an appeal of beauty and meaning before the winds and frosts make them
fall into a long bare silence. During the short hot summer you hardly notice leaves but death
makes you pay attention to details and then the more you watch the more you see.
In Nova Scotia I first heard of ‘Seton Watching', a method of being in nature attributed to the
British naturalist, Ernest Thompson Seton, who was a pioneer of animal fiction as a well as the
founder of the Boy Scouts in the United States. In the 1880s he came to Canada from his native
Durham and immediately formed a lifelong love for woods and wilderness and a passion for
wolves. As an educator, Black Wolf as he called himself, he would take young people out of
town and sit them completely still in the woods for twenty minutes, doing nothing but an intense
watching and listening. The stillness attracted the wild animals to approach and the people
became, through watching, part of the natural surroundings. ‘In the wood the silent watcher
sees the most,' he wrote in ‘Birch Bark Roll of the Woodcraft Indians' and added, less
contemplatively, ‘The great difficulty in watching is how to pass the time.'
In Quebec a few days later I was passing the time quite easily watching the drama of the Fall
colours evolve to some hidden climax. The woods were in a state of suspense and wonder
although the end of the performance, if you thought about it, was obvious. It would be the same
outcome as every year. The glory of this world would fade and the branches would soon be
bare. I was in my room in the retreat centre but my two friends who were on the retreat passed
by my window, walking in the comfortable, unhurried silence of their long marriage along the
path that led into the woods. They had just told me that the good news they had celebrated with
me a few months ago – she did not have Parkinsons – had been cruelly reversed. The tests had
been redone as the symptoms increased; and now she did have it. They had begun to study the
disease.
The dying of the leaves attracts and holds your attention. As they die the green pigmented
chlorophyll decays rapidly. Yellow carotenids also break down, but more slowly, and red
anthocyanins are added as new short-lived creations of the dying process. So the familiar
green of the leaves dissolves away to reveal the yellow beneath and then the reds and browns
and golds are squeezed out as well. It is the shortening days of the year, the abbreviation of the
light, that force the trees to prepare like this for the winter dormancy.
The couple, wrapped up defiantly against the first cold fingers of the Canadian winter, walked
slowly arm in arm, he a little shorter than her, into the woods, into the colours. One of Rumi's
lines says that the lover of God should pray to be coloured with the colour of God. When, some
moments before, we had spoken tearfully of the medical news they had been bowled out by I
saw them as two castaways, blessedly together at least but nonetheless singled out,
touchingly childlike, surprised by the turn of events, helpless and yet already adapting to a new
reality. A great wilderness of solitude was opening up around them that they were getting to
know and understand simply by being in it. God's colour was becoming stronger in them. There
could be no resistance. They would have to sit and watch the colours peak and wait for the
leaves to fall. At mass after sunset we all prayed with them, anointing and blessing them for the
season of their lives they were moving into. If faith in the face of mortality has colour it must be
like the glorious Fall palette of Canada.
There will be fewer leaves on the trees as you read this than when I wrote it. Every fallen leaf
has left a scar on the stem it once clung to. Next to the scar of its loss is already a tiny bud from
which new shoots and leaves must spring.
spaces of the Americas have always been for me a relief and a source of revelation, places to
breathe in. During the Autumn in Eastern Canada the edges of the wilderness become
impossibly, almost tastelessly beautiful as the trees silently turn into waving rivers of scarlet,
chrome yellows, dark gold and rich brown. Mountain after mountain the cry becomes a chorus,
a demonstration for some intense but mysterious cause. They seem to be making a last
desperate statement, an appeal of beauty and meaning before the winds and frosts make them
fall into a long bare silence. During the short hot summer you hardly notice leaves but death
makes you pay attention to details and then the more you watch the more you see.
In Nova Scotia I first heard of ‘Seton Watching', a method of being in nature attributed to the
British naturalist, Ernest Thompson Seton, who was a pioneer of animal fiction as a well as the
founder of the Boy Scouts in the United States. In the 1880s he came to Canada from his native
Durham and immediately formed a lifelong love for woods and wilderness and a passion for
wolves. As an educator, Black Wolf as he called himself, he would take young people out of
town and sit them completely still in the woods for twenty minutes, doing nothing but an intense
watching and listening. The stillness attracted the wild animals to approach and the people
became, through watching, part of the natural surroundings. ‘In the wood the silent watcher
sees the most,' he wrote in ‘Birch Bark Roll of the Woodcraft Indians' and added, less
contemplatively, ‘The great difficulty in watching is how to pass the time.'
In Quebec a few days later I was passing the time quite easily watching the drama of the Fall
colours evolve to some hidden climax. The woods were in a state of suspense and wonder
although the end of the performance, if you thought about it, was obvious. It would be the same
outcome as every year. The glory of this world would fade and the branches would soon be
bare. I was in my room in the retreat centre but my two friends who were on the retreat passed
by my window, walking in the comfortable, unhurried silence of their long marriage along the
path that led into the woods. They had just told me that the good news they had celebrated with
me a few months ago – she did not have Parkinsons – had been cruelly reversed. The tests had
been redone as the symptoms increased; and now she did have it. They had begun to study the
disease.
The dying of the leaves attracts and holds your attention. As they die the green pigmented
chlorophyll decays rapidly. Yellow carotenids also break down, but more slowly, and red
anthocyanins are added as new short-lived creations of the dying process. So the familiar
green of the leaves dissolves away to reveal the yellow beneath and then the reds and browns
and golds are squeezed out as well. It is the shortening days of the year, the abbreviation of the
light, that force the trees to prepare like this for the winter dormancy.
The couple, wrapped up defiantly against the first cold fingers of the Canadian winter, walked
slowly arm in arm, he a little shorter than her, into the woods, into the colours. One of Rumi's
lines says that the lover of God should pray to be coloured with the colour of God. When, some
moments before, we had spoken tearfully of the medical news they had been bowled out by I
saw them as two castaways, blessedly together at least but nonetheless singled out,
touchingly childlike, surprised by the turn of events, helpless and yet already adapting to a new
reality. A great wilderness of solitude was opening up around them that they were getting to
know and understand simply by being in it. God's colour was becoming stronger in them. There
could be no resistance. They would have to sit and watch the colours peak and wait for the
leaves to fall. At mass after sunset we all prayed with them, anointing and blessing them for the
season of their lives they were moving into. If faith in the face of mortality has colour it must be
like the glorious Fall palette of Canada.
There will be fewer leaves on the trees as you read this than when I wrote it. Every fallen leaf
has left a scar on the stem it once clung to. Next to the scar of its loss is already a tiny bud from
which new shoots and leaves must spring.
| MESSAGE FROM FATHER LAURENCE, September 2006 |