I’ve recently been made to reflect on another one of Frost’s poem.

Frost paints a picture of stark contrast. On the one hand, we romanticise the coming of fall. We’re enchanted by its beautiful colours, its quiet mornings and its mist dispersing the sun’s rays, making everything look magical. We wish time to slow down so we can savour the experience and the beauty it brings. The reality, however, is that it is the season of decay, before the season of death. When time shows his face, nature sheds her leaves.

Perhaps we can look at the leaves on the trees as the sustenance that Allah provides for them, just like the food and other blessings He brings to us. But once these are spent and their appointed time in our life is up, they become wastes and we must let them go. We must shed what has become waste for us because if not it metastasises into illness. Our true provision, then, is only that from which we are able to benefit. That which we have utilised for God.

When we are blessed with so much, and we have been given plenty, how do we use it? In Chinese cosmology, prosperity is a good that arises when nature is in balance and harmony. Wealth is good when with it we are in a better place to act upon Allah’s blessed name as The Provider, Al-Razzaq. We become the channel through whom He spreads His Wealth. That is how we utilise the abundance that has been provided to us by Allah for Allah, even though we may not use it ourselves. But if we are simply amassing for our own gratification, then what we are serving is our nafs. How we do one thing is how we do everything. When we are prone to wasting the abundance within our grasp, perhaps what we are really doing is wasting away life itself.

Life is the ultimate blessing breathed into us from the Ever-Living, Al-Hayy, by the Life-Giver, Al-Muhyi. Yet, He is also the Life-Taker, Al-Mumit. The dunya world is naturally one collective waste. Time passes, and things pass along with it. We live our earthly lives dying the moment we’re born. What differentiates the dying from the truly living—the wasteful from the grateful—is the one who uses his life in service of the Divine.

• • •

October
By Robert Frost

O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
Tomorrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know.
Release one leaf at break of day;
At noon release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away.
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.
Slow, slow!
For the grapes’ sake, if they were all,
Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost—
For the grapes’ sake along the wall.