Trace of fire touches the world. Foliage looses its wild howl before surrender in a last blast of light. Harvest is on the land and in the trees. Golden orchards are laden with fruit; ripe, russet apples, crisp and sweet, wine dark grapes bending the vine.

Autumn begins in sensual richness and moves toward its own demise with quiet mists and melancholic light. In my part of the world, the wet west coast rainforest of Canada, streamers of swallows gather for their southern journey.

Autumn straddles the balance between fecundity and decay, bacchanalia and the monastic simplicity of bared forms. Trees shed their ball gowns to reveal the beauty of trunks and limbs lithe as arm bones. Autumn's paradox is that while leaves fall and flowers wither, nature is also recklessly scattering her seed. She uses the wind, the wanderings of animals and birds, our own woollen coats and those of the dogs we walk, to spread her seeds of new life into the moist and waiting ground. Elegant armatures of seed pods, skeletons of plants like sculptures are left to grace our winter gardens, while the fallen seeds becalmed beneath their waiting white beds, dream the spring into blossom.

As I move into the autumn of my own existence, I perceive beauty in the fragile yet resilient ochre crowns of the hydrangea. I see wholeness where once, in the spring of my life I may have failed to appreciate diminishment and loss as necessary gifts. Effulgence and loss are held entwined in the hidden and mysterious circularity of our biosphere of unity. As the hours of sunlight and warmth recede in Autumn, so does the chlorophyll leave the plant; greening gives way to brilliant colour. It was there all along, just as our inner richness and complexity can be coaxed forth by loss. Autumn reminds me that to be fruitful, life must be in acceptance of both living and dying. Gabryel Harrison