9/22/24 Fall Equinox
Wood engraving by Wesley Bates
For me, Fall Equinox is a time for reflection and as my farming neighbors begin their massive harvest, I return to an earlier post entitled “Crop Harvest.”
But first, I happily acknowledge three events that have aligned this year on the 2024 Fall Equinox:
1) Caroline and Jess’s 7th Wedding Anniversary; 2) Rett’s oldest sister, Connie’s birthday; and
3) Ellington Thompson Moore's Christening. Happy Day to all!
Now let’s circle back to “Crop Harvest”, and examine it as a metaphor for reaping life’s harvest. Let’s explore an acronym CROP.
C is for creativity. We are creatures born to use our brains to process information and use our talents to be creative. A mechanical engineer, or team of engineers, designed the great corn combines that harvests the corn. Creativity takes many forms and is primary to living a productive life. Some folks are more creative than others, for I have watched and listened to my neighbors, Keith (RIP) and Robert. One is mechanically minded who uses his brainpower to diagnose problems of engineering; and the other is a poet whose creative mind uses the elements of language to describe life events around him. They are both wonderfully creative.
R is for re-creation. By that I mean taking another person’s creative product, and making/changing it in someway to make it one’s own. Most musicians in the 21st Century are re-creators. A self-analysis reveals that I am more re-creative than creative. During my “working days”, I spent most of my time as an artist/teacher recreating, through practice and performance, the works of other musical creators: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Britten, and Barber, just to name a few. I often told my students, “Without us performers, the great works of musical art would be manuscripts collecting dust in someone’s library.” But I was most envious of those creative musicians around me who could “improvise” extemporaneously and whose musical ideas “played-out” automatically through their fingers.
I consider Rett’s knitting to be re-creative. She takes yarn spun into skeins by someone else, reads and follows someone else’s “pattern”, then uses her own hands to knit a product she intends as a gift for a special person.
O is for observation. Being the only vowel in the word CROP, O perhaps signifies the most important aspect during and before life’s harvest. It is such a blessing to watch my granddaughters as they observe their environment and the happenings around them. We all should be so inquisitive.
Merry Mount is a marvelous place for us to observe, not only the harvest, but all seasonal activity. I recollect the last song, Final Entry, from Dominick Argento’s song cycle, From the Diary of Virginia Wolff. Wolff writes:
No: I intend no introspection. I mark Henry James’ sentence: observe perpetually. Observe the oncome of age. Observe greed. Observe my own despondency. By that means it becomes serviceable. Or so I hope. I insist on spending this time to the best advantage.
Human beings are magnificent creatures. Most of us have the ability to engage our senses and observe perpetually. We can view beautiful sunsets, we can smell the roses, we can hear the hermit thrush or the Meditation from Thais, we can feel the hen’s feathers, and we can taste tomato pie. And if we so choose, we can recollect those experiences in our minds. I intend introspection.
P is for procreation. Science teaches us that our biological bodies are primarily intended for procreation. We are designed to share our DNA potentially for eternal life.
CROP HARVEST
My seed has spilled forth,
And I have harvested a son and a daughter
Whose seeds still germinate
And whose harvest is yet to come.
This Creator, Re-Creator, Observer, Procreator,
lives the harvest
And the crops that are stored in the silo of time
will be retrieved by the Force
that erupted in the first explosion of seed.
-CPW
Wood engraving by Wesley Bates
CPW
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