My sincere joy

The ritual is the same every season. My gaze wanders, humble and fatalistic, before the emaciated pastel colours of the vegetation, tired in its branches or already slumped, lifeless on the ground.

The sun has exhausted them yet again. Why can't we get enough of this concert of stillness and abandonment? In some places, you think you're watching the frozen course of a comet leaf on concrete. In others, the skilful blending of a painter's mastery of colour.

You'd see the same thing in a painting and walk away, yawning with boredom at the lack of originality. Yet, in the ordinary passage of our steps through the fabric of time, autumnal hues fill us with a serene peace, totally submissive to our destiny.

Far from making this a universal law, it's certainly true for me. It's already been a year. I could say it to myself every day I live. But autumn has its own way of making us aware of it. Many regions on Earth don't have these reminders. Desert people have their own clocks, warring peoples live by a different calendar, legions of animals listen to the sirens of magnetic fields, and bacteria, viruses, and other cells walk blindly and willingly between the atoms of their universes.

My tiny person is only the fruit of a well-orchestrated coincidence with climate change. I can only hope that climate change keeps the theatre of these seasonal movements. They form more than a spinal column in me, almost religious, without certainty, just a feeling of existing and being content with what I am and experience. My daily amen, my creative silence, my sincere joy.