Fall is my favorite time of year. As the days get shorter, the nights get cooler, inviting you to put on something cozy and warm before gathering round a campfire with friends. By the time October rolls around, football season is well underway, as are the yellows and reds scattered amongst the once-green leaves of the northwoods. To me, fall is comfort. I love how it leads into the holiday seasons of Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas — joyous times that each conjure their own moods of nostalgia mixed with anticipation.
I’ve always been grateful to live in a place that has four seasons. While living outside of any one season, you gain a fresh perspective of all the wondrous elements that season holds and look forward to the moment it will arrive again. It’s a constant cycle of welcoming back something that’s both novel and completely familiar at the same time.
The following image from kottke.org struck me in its representation of how seasons bring change to one, isolated place, in this case a Finnish island, which is surprisingly shaped similar to Grenada.
Living abroad brings with it a strange juxtaposition of missing where you’re from while embracing where you are. I’ve been missing fall in the Midwest and all its delights, the changing of the color of leaves among them. In Grenada, there’s a rainy season and a dry season. We’re currently in the rainy season, which ends in late November. Other than scattered showers, I’ve started to wonder, “What aspects of Grenada should I be embracing while it’s my time to be here?”
This was on my mind one morning when I picked up Rick Rubin’s, The Creative Act: A Way of Being. I’ve been reading it every morning as a kind of devotional. The chapters are short and accessible, and offer a wealth of practical wisdom on cultivating creativity in your life — a perfect way to start the day. In a chapter on nature as teacher, Rubin brings up the seasons and other ways nature changes. He writes:
Nature is the most absolute and enduring. We can witness it change through the seasons. We can see it in the mountains, the oceans, the deserts, and the forest. We can watch the changes of the moon each night, and the relationship between the moon and the stars.
He goes on to talk about the wide range of color available to us in nature:
If you step out in nature, the palette is infinite. Each rock has such a variation of color within it, we could never find a can of paint to mimic the exact same shade.
Reading this really primed me (no pun intended) to intentionally embrace all of the new colors around me. As is the case with most things in life, when you catch onto an idea, other connections to that idea seem to pop up everywhere you look. Shortly after reading Rubin’s description of nature’s infinite color palette, I stumbled upon the following video from thurstonphoto.
The wave crashing beautifully in slow motion reveals a wide spectrum of blues and greens, a nuance that might go unnoticed in real time or casually missed by the unattuned eye. Anyone who comes to Grenada can see that the ocean surrounding it is made up of a vast array of blues and greens. I started to wonder if I might pull some meaning from them in the same way I would while reflecting on the reds and yellows of my home during this time of year.
So this October I’m contemplating blue. In his book, Theory of Colours (via The Marginalian), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe writes:
We love to contemplate blue — not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it.
I relate to being drawn into a thing. Strangely, I think we are drawn into gazing out at the immensity of the ocean in a way that’s similar to how we are drawn into staring at the intimacy of a fire’s flame — one large and one small, yet both inspiring a sense of awe. Considering the connection here to the fall (warmth of a fire), I was motivated to dig (or swim?) further.
I discovered Rebecca Solnit’s book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, via The Marginalian, and am currently working my way through it. In her book, Solnit contemplates the color blue. She starts by providing a scientific basis for why we see different shades of blue in nature and goes on to describe blue as the color of desire and longing. She writes:
The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.
For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains. “Longing,” says the poet Robert Hass, “because desire is full of endless distances.” Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world.
I found this so applicable to my current feelings of wanting to embrace Grenada while at the same time missing home. Solnit goes on to caution against fulfilling our desires through closing the great distance embodied by the blue of the ocean, in an attempt to grab hold of that which we seek. She writes:
We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond (…) Something is always far away.
The idea of owning your “longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed,” speaks an overwhelming truth to my soul. There is such empowerment to be found in accepting whatever uncontrolled adversity you face, and embracing those aspects of life that are within your ability to control. A shift of perspective is often all it takes. As humans, we are always longing for something, whether it be within our control or beyond it. What if we made peace with this fact and were contented to live in harmony alongside that longing instead? She concludes:
The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with the years of travel. If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not … abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway.
(…)
Some things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant.
It is indeed a complex terrain we traverse, filled with surprising contradictions.
I see shades of blue all around me here. The ocean is reminding me of all the beauty to be found in this place just as it reminds me of how much I long for home.
Yet, if the blue of the ocean represents a great distance between me and home, I think it also provides a connection. Wisconsin is no stranger to expansive bodies of water after all. As I sit on a beach on the southern shores of Grenada, I know that two buddies of mine may very well be sitting on the northern shores of Wisconsin. I’m content to think about them, along with many others, while I welcome new waves upon my shore.
As a final note, I love the music of fall. For the past couple of years I’ve put together a new Halloween mix each October. The Charlie Brown holiday specials are also some of my favorites, and I love the mood that the Vince Guarldi Trio brings to each season. So in honor of where I come from and where I am, I put together an October Oceans playlist. I intentionally made it to blend together the blues and greens of the Caribbean with the reds and yellows of the Midwest. You can listen to it here.
