All the Pretty Pumpkins Gone Away

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back. Let's think about pumpkins.














As I perambulated in the early morning yesterday, I walked past a church that annually fills up its yard with hundreds of pumpkins in October. You can see a photographic view I took this year during one of my walks.  

The air felt breezy and cool. A full moon glowed through a thin layer of fast moving cloud cover, illuminating dark stretches of sidewalk beyond the reach of the street lights.  

When I passed the church, the hard dirt lawn covered with straw looked desolate. Maybe I had noted before that the pumpkins were gone as I drove past, or even walked by, but I had the sensation yesterday as if for the first time that they had all vanished.

Their disappearance did not strike me as gradual, but as occurring overnight. I did see buyers coming and going in the yard. Surely, the number of pumpkins decreased, but that was forgotten yesterday morning.

Those pumpkins make my life interesting. Every year they represent the changing of the season from torrid summer to delicious autumn. Now, that they are gone, it feels as if they never existed.  

There's an awareness of normalcy that can be very comforting when the seasons change. A sudden surge of joy can catch us off guard when something familiar that has been long gone appears again.  

I will smile when I see pumpkins set out again onto that church yard. It reminds me how difficult it is to describe a spiritual moment. 

Most of us think speaking in tongues is spiritual or praying is divine. I have no experience with the former and the latter often has all the sensation of an exercise. 

Indeed, I imagine a genuine spiritual experience would be rare, not weekly, and it would contain an element of surprise.

Like when the mere sight of pumpkins annually shrouded in night can suddenly become numinous and suggest a reality that has always been, but is not always revealed.

Blessings...