Today is the last day of summer, but yesterday actually felt like it.  Something in the air, something about the time, made yesterday feel like a day of endings. The fact that it was the last day of the "old" Yankee Stadium only added to the sense of finality.  And all of the "end of an era" talk about the financial crisis.  But it was more than that.

     This is, of course, the classic autumn feeling.  We've reached a peak in the life cycles of most plants and many animals.  The first hints of turning leaves can be seen at the top the the mountain ridges.  If you drive forty-five minutes north the colors are already full.  The wild weeds hang heavy with growth, ready to collapse and fall back into winter dormancy.  Even the squirrels seem slower, exhausted, perhaps, by their frenetic preparations against the on-coming cold. 

    We'll soon move the backyard picnic table up onto the porch and gather in the various plants that will spend the frozen months indoors.  There will be warm days still, like today: blue skies and bright sun.  But the nights are crisp and the mornings foggy.  There's much that is ending.  And much that is beginning, too.

    Where to go with this feeling?  How about The Book of Lieh-Tzu, the third of the Taoist classics.  Here, with no further commentary by me, is a passage which reflects upon the imperceptible line between endings and beginnings:

Yu Hsiung said:

'Turning without end Heaven and Earth shift secretly.  Who is aware of it?'

So the thing which is shrinking here is swelling there, the thing that is maturing here is decaying there.  Shrinking and swelling, maturing and decaying, it is being born at the same time that it is dying.  The interval between the coming and the going is imperceptible.  Who is aware of it?  Whatever a thing may be, its energy is not suddenly spent, its form does not suddenly decay; we are aware neither of when it reaches maturity not of when it begins to decay.  It is the same with a man's progress from birth to old age; his looks, knowledge, and bearing differ from one day to the next, his skin and nails and hair are growing at the same time as they are falling away.  They do not stop as they were in childhood without changing.  But we cannot be aware of the intervals; we must wait for their fruition before we know.