FALL

Come fall, the season asks for its own name and the leaves oblige. Green lets go of life with a faith that astounds me; making space for the brilliant shades of decay. This is a season when the deciduous could be called the generous for the sacrificing of their growth to the ground as a gift to the soil.

Gales whistle a cue the leaves have been waiting for. With the help of the wind and rain and gravity and decay, they fall. Alder leaves form a blanket on chilled ground and fulfil their fate to become one with their birthplace. They return to the thick black body of their mother earth from which saplings are born, from which seeds of trees and flora of all kinds emerge. This fertile leaf blanket nourishes, replenishes, and rebuilds the womb of a forest - the soil.

And in this way the deciduous are not unlike salmon. How they give (generously). Where they end up (where they began). These humble leaves will die into a fertile dirt. We are all shapeshifters in the end.
We all have it. The ability to simultaneously die and become, like leaves into dirt, like salmon into bear, like form into spirit. And in this regard, isn’t decomposition, or digestion, or death, a miracle the same as birth?

Where I once saw only stagnant individuality, I now find transformative interdependence everywhere. Death and birth as two sides of the same leaf. I breathe in a crisp sky; feel it fill my lungs. I feel it fill every cell of my animal body before giving it back to the atmosphere. I give thanks for this becoming, this turning inward, this season of returning.