It's no secret that autumn is my favourite time of year. The days are still warm and the nights grow progressively cooler. Winter is forestalled but never halted; the heat of the sun in May is diminished and a palpable chill fills the air as the days shorten. Through all of this, leaves turn, sometimes to the deepest red, sometimes a shade of red that is impossible to describe, only to witness.

I have been reading again the work of Tang Dynasty poets and marvelling at their easy immersion in the natural world. Profoundly influenced by Taoism (and a love of wine!) poets like Du Fu, Wang Wei and Li Bai wrote about the relationship, profound as they saw it, between people and nature. They were also deeply sensitive to the vicissitudes of the human condition. Consider Li Bai's Crows Calling at Night:

Yellow clouds beside the walls; crows near the tower.
Flying back, they caw, caw; calling in the boughs.
In the loom she weaves brocade, the Qin river girl.
Made of emerald yarn like mist, the window hides her words.
She stops the shuttle, sorrowful, and thinks of the distant man.
She stays alone in the lonely room, her tears just like the rain.

As moderns, we often consider our ethics and understanding to be superior to people in the past, as if lost love or a broken heart were uniquely contemporary affairs. It is a foolish mistake. Li enters the world of the Qin river girl with conviction, the poem moving from the exterior world of the crows and their cawing, to the interior world of the girl, who, stopping her work, "thinks of the distant man."