The wonder of letting beauty triumph

So much of the time I don't know what I'll write until the moment arrives.

Writing is a river with twists and bends and changes in direction. Today, I had thought I might zero in on a prompt from my Pens & Friends writing community — a school memory. I'd written about the “misfits” throughout my school years, and how I'd missed opportunities to befriend them. I titled it “Miss Fits.” But this seems destined for a future topic.

Then my meditative time this morning yielded an old note beside a Bible passage calling on God to save the psalmist from his enemies. I had scribbled, “Who is my enemy?” God had dropped His one-word answer in my mind — “disillusionment.” But, after overeating last weekend at a women's retreat and continuing to do so when I returned home, I added another enemy — “instant gratification.” You know, you see it, think it, want it — and go for it.

As I continued to read the psalm, I discovered the writer had pursued his enemy — an actual army — and did not turn back. Rather he says of God, “You have also made my enemies turn their backs on me.” Now there is some strategy. In the case of instant gratification to pursue is not to pursue — if that makes sense. Maybe this is what I'm doing wrong, letting it engulf me rather than turning my back. Do that enough and it will turn its back.

This still did not seem like it was the right focus. And then I stepped outside as the sun was rising on this first day of autumn. The sky was a magnificent red orange — smeared across the heavens. Which doesn't sound very poetic, but that is how it looked. God's “finger painting” in fall colors.

This is what I needed to write — autumn beauty. I have had a friend who, over Audrey's Thursday turkey dinners, once told me how depression hits her in this particular change of seasons. Perhaps the lessening light — and the temperature drop — and the vision of barren branches.

These things are all true. But lessening light is the chance to see more stars. And temperature drop is a chance to savor a good cup of steaming coffee — or for me, hot chocolate. Have you ever looked at those little globes of rain each clinging along a bare branch or really noticed the strength of those exposed trees without their leaves?

And the show the leaves make before the curtain drops, before they drop, is stop-in-your-tracks breathtaking. For a while they are just as pretty on the ground — like the finger-painting smear in the sky. Don't forget what actually grows from the ground — those lumpy balls of orange we call pumpkins. I know from my time in Minnesota that I cannot drive past a field of pumpkins without smiling.

Apples are another colorful autumn fruit. The hardest thing to leave behind when returning to our Idaho roots was the honeycrisp tree. It, unfortunately, also had roots.

Beauty or beast. The change of season can loom as both. How gratifying it is to let beauty triumph.

Carol Shirk Knapp is the author of "The Preacher's Kid" column.