Autumn scents send subtle signals every year that it’s time for change

By David McElroy · December 2, 2018

As I turned onto a street leading into my neighborhood Sunday evening, I suddenly felt a gentle feeling of familiar warmth and well-being.

It felt like the inviting call of a fireplace and family. It felt like comfort and safety and love. It felt like the excitement of casting away old things and starting anew.

That was the sensation deep in my brain and that’s what it felt like as those signals spread to my heart. But it was really just the scent of someone burning leaves nearby. My brain and heart filled in the rest, because I’ve come to associate autumn with everything good about home and family — everything I want and need the most — and burning leaves are among the obscure triggers for those feelings.

I love autumn. I love everything from the first of October until the start of the new year. All the things about those three months combine to give me feelings of comfort and hope — along with blind faith that something better lies just ahead.

As I stepped out of my car, the sound of my shoes crunching through the dry leaves — brown and gold and red all around me — reinforced the feeling. I don’t know where the smell of burning leaves was coming from. I’ve never burned leaves in my life. I’m not sure why anybody does it. But I smelled it enough growing up that this is one of those triggers for this time of year.

Scents and sounds and sights such as these are powerful for me. As much as I love words, these sensory experiences trigger things in me more easily than words can. A breeze blowing fallen leaves around as I crunch through them is another of those triggers. The sight of Christmas decorations slowly lighting up at homes all around me — one by one as we get deeper into December — is another.

I need this season of harvest every year. Without consciously knowing it, I’ve settled into counting on each autumn as a time to clear things away in my own life. Every year at this time, I’m coming to a reckoning of what the year has been. I’m mentally clearing the books. I’m considering what progress I’ve made. I’m forgiving myself for my mistakes. And I’m allowing myself to feel hope that what comes next will be even better.

A cynical person might say I let myself off too easily each year, but the truth is that self-forgiveness and starting over are the only ways we can really deal with ourselves, because we humans are creatures of cycles.

In the Hebrew scriptures, we’re told that God decreed a Jubilee year once in every 50 years. The book of Leviticus tells us that slaves and prisoners would be freed, debts would be forgiven and lands which had been lost would be returned to those who had lost them.

Everyone was given a clean slate to start over.

If Jubilee gave the entire society a fresh start, the annual repeating pattern of Nature does the same for individuals. We can each experience a personal Jubilee. We can free ourselves and forgive ourselves — if we dare to do so — and we can start with a clean slate for the coming year.

I haven’t accomplished everything I had hoped for in 2018. I haven’t been as financially successful as I’d planned. I’m not as close to the future I want as I had thought I would be. I haven’t found the love and family which I so desperately need.

But I can’t take those disappointments with me into the new year. I have to start over. I have to wipe the slate clean and give myself permission to hope and to feel blind faith. These sights and these sounds and (especially) these scents are all part of that process. They’re like little rituals which clean out the temple within and make me ready for something new.

So I welcome the burning leaves in the distance. I welcome the crunch of dead leaves under my feet. I welcome a slight chill in the air. I welcome the sights and sounds of approaching Christmas.

These things tell me it’s time to start all over again. They tell me it’s time to hope for love. They promise me that the past doesn’t have to be the future.

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We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.

I’ve been making some changes to the site lately and there are more changes coming in the days ahead, so don’t be surprised if you some small differences. This is not a wholesale redesign, but rather the addition of some features. Since they’re smarter than I am, I’ve put Oliver and Alex in charge of the technical work, which you can see in this action photo from the control room of our media complex. I recently added a series of landing pages for readers who randomly discover the site from an Internet search. I’ve also changed the YouTube link at the top of the page to go to the new YouTube channel for video essays that reflect things I’ve already published here. (Here’s a little bit about both of the YouTube channels I’m working on.) In addition, I’m trying to move away from using Instagram, so I’m experimenting with photo plug-ins that will eventually allow me to host the pictures — cats, dogs, sunsets, whatever — that I often take. So don’t be surprised to see more changes. Thanks for your patience. Let’s hope Alex and Oliver know what they’re doing.

I have no use for the theocratic and repressive government of Iran. The people who run the country are cruel at best and evil at worst. The Iranian people deserve freedom. But I have no personal quarrel with anybody in Iran. While I’m not thrilled about a future Iranian government having nuclear weapons, I’m just as concerned about nukes in the hands of politicians in Israel, Pakistan, India, China and Russia. I’m not even thrilled with the U.S., Britain and France having them, either, because I don’t trust any politicians to be responsible with such terrible weapons. All I can say with certainty is that American taxpayers have no business attacking Iran, especially since we’re being forced to pay for this attack in order to benefit the politicians of Israel — and nobody else. If Middle Eastern countries want to fight among themselves, that’s none of my business. It’s not the business of the U.S. government, either. I have no quarrel with anybody in Iran — and having the government which claims to represent me launch an unprovoked attack against a sovereign country will only make all Americans less safe in the near future. This attack is poorly conceived and morally unjustified. Remember that when the Iranians launch attacks that we will then condemn as “terrorism.” What the U.S. is doing right now looks like terrorism to me. And let’s not forget that the attack is the latest in a long line of unconstitutional wars by various U.S. presidents — who have no legal power to declare war on their own, according to the U.S. Constitution.

A child having a tantrum understands only one thing: Did I get my way or not? He doesn’t understand the issues involved. He doesn’t understand the reasons that went into a decision. He doesn’t understand any of the things that mature and reasonable adults have to understand in order to live healthy lives. By his reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to strike down his disastrous tariff scheme, Donald Trump shows himself to be — once more — a screaming child having a tantrum. Outside the world of mob bosses who expect to get their way every time, normal adults don’t act this way, but Trump isn’t normal. He’s an angry and vengeful man who has narcissistic personality disorder. And we are in danger as a result. Trump doesn’t understand the legal issues involved in this ruling. He doesn’t understand economics. He doesn’t understand rule of law. He doesn’t understand that he can ever be wrong. All he understands is that he didn’t get his way. And he is now a narcissistic and raging little boy who also happens to hold life-and-death power over most humans on this planet. He’s dangerous — and the system which gives him that power is even more dangerous.

Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

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