What Flaubert refers to as the “mélancholies du voyage” is like the sadness I feel as one season departs and another arrives.

To trace the history of a river or a raindrop is also to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body. In both, we constantly seek and stumble upon divinity, which like feeding the lake, and the spring becoming a waterfall, feeds, spills, falls, and feeds itself all over again.

To know something, then, we must be scrubbed raw, the fasting heart exposed.

Am I like the optimist who, while falling ten stories from a building, says at each story, I'm all right so far?

Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons.

To long for love, to have experienced passion's deep pleasure, even once, is to understand the mercilessness of having a human body whose memory rides desire's back unanchored from season to season.

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.