Autumn Pastels: That Book..

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
F. Scott Fitzgerald.

If you know how to read Nature as a book, then you will know Her signs. So said many who have returned to Nature in order to return to themselves. They left to do a work of outwards reconnaissance and they ended up doing a work of inwards reconnaissance. What did they gain? Their palms with which they support the Earth and the Heaven and are stronger than that.

Coldness has come to the city! It looks like autumn has come to claim her rightful place. The overcast sky tames the sunlight even more or it makes it sad.

It rains in the plains and in the mountains it is sometimes clear and the sun is shinning, and other times it snows up on the crests. What a paradox, nevertheless! Where is the global warming? Shouldn’t it be everywhere?

I’ve been, lately, criticizing human facts, for ours are the most visible, loud and clear, that is, that we neglect Nature and ourselves, as if the entire Earth is our trash can. I have come to believe that we like and are complacent to live in squalor.

The degenerations still continue, actually. I don’t know when will they stop. But how to awaken people’s consciousness that what they do is not right, on a long term? How to awaken them in order to want to change themselves? I, obviously, don’t want to live in squalor, but see how we came to depart from one another, not having the same values any longer. Some don’t care, others do.

Slackness and negligence continue too, marching towards a tragic end for the human condition, for yes, we momentarily are conditions for Nature. We normally are energy condensers and resource transformers. But now we are more consumers and we acutely damage the places in which we live and travel. We have gone so far that where we step, grass doesn’t grow anymore.

I repeat, autumn has come, but not yet the yellow leaf, only as a suggestion. I saw it painted here and there, on the alpine meadows, as if the Lord Time has come down from the crests through the vales with the skates of death or rebirth. Wherever He passed, the blades of grass have dried and the other… Elsewhere, blueberry and cranberry bushes have rusted. Rhododendrons no longer bloom and, with this, it seams that it has disappeared from the landscape.

The selective light gives me headaches again, in composing a significant photograph, but also surprises me pleasantly and makes me raise my camera and shoot some frames. I explore, I compose, I capture or imortalize places, situations, moments, which, in their abstraction, they seem meaningless, but they speak to me in a silent language of the signs of Nature, of the landscape, a continuous dance which, even if I refuse to join in, but I try to catch it in a pastel frame.

I can call it therapy, but I’ve learned to open not only my eyes but my mind and my heart as well, and to know and recognize the seemingly surrounding world. Human nature, however, seems to me the most difficult to read. I’m still not used to the sophisticated human language, even though I am human too.. not only the spoken but the unspoken one as well, hidden in gestures and always interpretable for when I am not attentive.

I said that we have separated between each other very much, though, others of us, came pretty close to each other. This sorting is called Apocalypse in other terms. We separated from the ones who don’t love Nature. They no longer appreciate real childhood lived in Nature, although this brings us joy, because Nature IS joy.

We, Romanians, are sad, as Leo Tolstoy said when he visited the Romanian city: “what people full of melancholy!”. I read, in these anthropological pages, the slowness of the Romanian man misused, misplaced tolerance brought to the extreme to utter and terrible half-heartedness. Have we become so fatalists that, most of us, don’t want to prosper anymore? Have we become so little that we only want to survive?

Autumn does not come to destroy, but to rebuild. Some things retreat while other things return.

Have you ever seen more interesting colours during summer, than you see during autumn? Have you ever known such colour abstractions during the high season? How hard do you look for them in summer?

For all the pessimists out there, I say unto you: it’s not about that Hope never dies, but She never transforms, never disguises, never leaves, never comes, never disappears.. She remains eternal. She IS eternal!

As long as you still have resources, use them! Don’t look for surviving! Look for thriving! In fact, survival is superior living – sur (superior) – vival (viva, life, living).

I was on the mountain crests again, on the alpine meadows and, admiring the skated landscape with the brush of autumn, made me wanna sing that yellow leaf song, by Baniciu. It’s a sad song, a sort of longing or doina of grief.. or maybe I wouldn’t call it this way. But it is a love song, nevertheless, an idyllic ballad of summer end and the beginning of autumn.. a sign. The man does not let himself brought down by sadness and prevails with joy although he is broken-hearted by the yellow leaf of the woodland.. so said his lover pointing it out to him. But every song has a secret: it is written and the writing remains. When you utter it, it travels as if it has a beginning and an end, but when it is written it becomes eternal.

The cycle of autumn goes on but it is not the end. It is only a defeat and we start over?…