From A Walk through the Year

October 15: It is curious how close we feel to someone – even someone we have never met, even someone who lived in a remote period in the past and in a far-distant country – when we find that he, too, experienced the same outlook, the same feelings we have known. For me, each year, at this time of the beauty of the tinted leaves, this most beautiful period of our northern autumn, I come to my own personal Independence Day, my own Fourth of July in fall. For it was on this fifteenth day of October that I escaped to a freedom I have never left. On that day, after thirteen years in a New York magazine office, I left behind my regular salary to launch myself into the hazards of a freelance life as a photographer of and writer about the world of nature. Everything good that has followed – the books I have written, the journeys across the land and through the seasons we have made, these Trail Wood acres where now we are walking through the year – began on this autumn day which I commemorate each year. And when this Freedom Day comes round, I always remember T’ao Ch’ien, the fourteenth century Chinese poet:

Even as a young man

I was out of tune with ordinary pleasures.

It was my nature to love the rooted hills,

The high hills which look upon the four edges of heaven.

What folly to spend one’s life like a dropped leaf

Snared under the dust of city streets.

But for thirteen years it was so I lived.

T’ao Ch’ien – so far away, so long ago – knew the same attitudes, the same emotions that have been mine. And in this poem of his, “Once More Fields and Gardens,” he set them down on paper half a thousand years before I was born.

Edwin Way Teale