All through autumn we hear a double voice: one says everything is ripe; the other says everything is dying. The paradox is exquisite. We feel what the Japanese call "aware"--an almost untranslatable word meaning something like "beauty tinged with sadness.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the duality of life, illustrating the beauty found in the interplay of life and death.
Gretel Ehrlich's quote captures the essence of autumn as a season of contrasts, where we are reminded of the cyclical nature of life. It emphasizes the simultaneous existence of ripeness and decay, inviting us to appreciate the beauty found in sadness, an idea encapsulated in the Japanese concept of 'aware.' This profound awareness urges us to embrace the dualities of existence, recognizing that beauty is often intertwined with melancholy.
In practice
In a speech about the changing seasons, to highlight how life is a blend of beauty and impermanence.
Love life first, then march through the gates of each season; go inside nature and develop the discipline to stop destructive behavior; learn tenderness toward experience, then make decisions based on creating biological wealth that includes all people, animals, cultures, currencies, languages, and the living things as yet undiscovered; listen to the truth the land will tell you; act accordingly.
The toughness I was learning was not a martyred doggedness, a dumb heroism, but the art of accommodation. I thought: to be tough is to be fragile; to be tender is to be truly fierce.
Animals give us their constant, unjaded faces, and we burden them with our bodies and civilized ordeals.
Autumn teaches us that fruition is also death; that ripeness is a form of decay. The willows, having stood for so long near water, begin to rust. Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons.
Wasn't he the one who said you shouldn't trust anybody who calls himself an ordinar man? - Naoko
Tis strange,-but true; for truth is always strange; Stranger than fiction: if it could be told, How much would novels gain by the exchange! How differently the world would men behold!
He believed in God even if he was doubtful of men's claims to know God's mind. But that a God unable to forgive was no God at all.
The autobiographical self has prompted extended memory, reasoning, imagination, creativity and language. And out of that came the instruments of culture - religions, justice, trade, the arts, science, technology.
You have learned enough to see that cats are much like you and me.
He [Stephen Douglas] is blowing out the moral lights around us, when he contends that whoever wants slaves has a right to hold them; that he is penetrating, so far as lies in his power, the human soul, and eradicating the light of reason and the love of liberty, when he is in every possible way preparing the public mind, by his vast influence, for making the institution of slavery perpetual and national.
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