Over the weekend, I mowed my lawn for the last time this year.  As autumn deepens, as air temperatures steadily drop, as evenings approach the freezing mark or lower, grass, as any botanist will tell us, does not grow.  Once vibrant and strong, come autumn's demarcation of weather and time, grass loses its steam, its growth patterns stifled, its vigor tamed and subsumed by the circadian rhythms of the planet.  I will not see it again until spring.     
     Many years ago, I wrote a poem about autumn.  I wrote about how the land fades, how the birds depart, how life seems at a standstill, how the world appears to slip away.  In a way, it's sad, in a way, it's poignant.  In another way, however, it's glorious.  In autumn's coming and the grasses of the world's demise, we catch a glimpse, a very tiny glimpse of the fact of loss that pervades all of existence.  But we also see, happily, the equally weighty fact of gain.  We see the beginning as much as we see the end.  And as much as we may mourn the passing of warmer weather, we also realize that, as medieval writers propounded in their notion of the Great Chain of Being, what we may think is perfection necessarily bristles with what we deem to be imperfection.  Absent an eternal earth, it must.
     I'm thankful that, in the ubiquitous wisdom of a divine creation, loss always heralds gain.