The first days of fall have sent me into a tizzy of reflections.  I find myself not only mourning the abrupt passing of summer, which once seemed eternal, but also the looming threat of upcoming winter.  And the muscle-memory of shoveling all that snow in turn evokes the bone-deep joy with which we greeted spring.  All four seasons swirling in my head as the leaves will soon be swirling in the streets.  When I was younger, each season sat in lonely majesty, endlessly itself.  The turning of the season was greeted with amazement and almost incomprehension, then I dove into the new experience with little thought of seasons past or future.  But now that I am middle-aged, I hold the full cycle in my imagination, all in one go.  I am simultaneously present with fall-that-is-now, the recent summer, the impending winter and the merest ghost of spring.

 

I think this is part of growing older, the ability to hold contradictions simultaneously in the imagination.

 

There is another blending of contradictions we've been asked to examine recently.  Scientists just last week announced a new species of our genus, Homo.  They are having trouble dating the new find, so it's not yet clear whether this will be the long sought "missing link"between genus Australopithecus and genus Homo.  To quickly recap, the species of genus Australopithecus are our more distant hominid ancestors, from roughly 3-4 million years ago.  They were only 4 feet tall and had pretty tiny brains.  We have separately discovered fossils of the many species of genus Homo dating from about 2 million years ago, the modern human.  There is a lot of curiosity about how we developed from Australopithecus to Homo, and not a lot of clues.  But this newest discovery, in a cave in South Africa, presents Homo naledi, with teeth and feet like ours, but intermediate in height and with a small brain.   It's skull, jaw and thumbs are modern, but shoulders and pelvis mirror Australopithecus.  This species would have walked upright but been equally adept at climbing trees like their predecessors.

 

This new species holds the contradiction of primitive and modern features.  It reminds me of another contradiction I've been struggling to hold in mind lately, our human kinship with all other life.

 

The Family Is All There Is, by Pattiann Rogers

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Isn't that marvelous?  What amazes me now is how complex ideas can live on top of each other in my brain.  In my youth, it was possible to believe just one truth at a time.  The world was much simpler.  One could believe one's creed.  Now everything contains its opposite, or its complement, its other half.  No fall without spring, no human without animal, no modern without ancient.  This reminds me of this moment from the Tao Te Ching (verse 2):

 

 

We can't make sense of one thing in isolation.  Fall is meaningless without summer and winter.  Human is meaningless without our kinship with the animals.  Complexity encompasses.