AUTUMN EPILOGUE – 50 Gms

Tales of an arduous journey from London to Kathmandu still can still be heard along the India-Nepal border where travelers arrived by road, back in the 70s via almost the same route as Marco Polo. They say it took them 3 months to cover 10,000 miles that included crossing a desert and three mountain ranges through Istanbul, Iran, Samarkand and Afghanistan before they got to India. Unlike Marco Polo, there is no documentation of these travelers except for a crudely inscribed wooden plaque near the border crossing, bearing their journey’s epilogue – “If only is what you seek then merely is what you will find”.  The elders in the villages still nostalgically and profoundly speculate on what they came looking for.

It is not hard to see that the quote isn’t inspired by the satiation of cheap thrills and grand adventure; instead bears a more transformative and profound comprehensiveness of expanding visions one experiences when confronted by the immersive vastness of our world. It’s hard to say with certainty why each of us begin our journeys but somewhere there is a subtle belief- what the world has to offer beyond the fulfilment of our goals and ambitions has the capability to transform our experience of life; maybe even rid us of our tunnel-vision and pettiness.

Alan Watts once said “It’s hard to fight the ego with the ego because there is no ego to begin with”. Maybe encountering the vastness of the world simply dissolves what isn’t there to begin with and we escape our self-laid trap of ‘only and merely’- meeting our lives ‘as-is’. Glimpses into scope of the universe leaves no room for pettiness to exist!  Infinitesimal against the vastness of the incomprehensible scale of the universe we may be, yet we can contain some idea of that vastness in our minds. There is no other way to make sense of this, except that we ourselves are the vastness that our infinitesimal self adds up to. Maybe there is no infinitesimal to begin with, no pettiness to challenge; only a journey to undertake, a vastness to embrace and an epilogue to write that inspires journeys more than it grants closure.

While epilogues are no distillation of the story or the journey, they do bottle up the distillation that references the vintages of our story; provide us with little containers to hold the narration and vastness in our infinitesimal selves. The Autumn Epilogue is simple; a befitting coda for Autumn – a conclusion referencing the narration itself. Notes of Sweet Potatoes with sweetness of cane sugar narrate the journey while the earthy and woody, slightly oaky taste quote the epilogue. Flavors of Cherries and Cocoa make evolved appearances layered on top of the sweetness. Blurring the edges of taste and aroma, there is only a soothing complexity that invokes both the floral and fruity. Made from carefully oxidized AV2 the red and black leaves the transparent red brew sits easy on the palate. The aftertaste bears a deep, almost nostalgic sweetness.  While the Epilogue is far from any conclusion of Autumn, it most definitely bears the narrative ‘Autumness’, we try so hard to contain.

“Wherever I am, I am what is missing. We all have reasons for moving, I move to keep things whole” – Mark Strand ‘Keeping things Whole’