Dance Leaves Dance
Fall, leaves fall; die, flowers, away;
Lengthen night and shorten day;
Every leaf speaks bliss to me
Fluttering from the autumn tree.
“Fall, leaves, fall” by Emily Brontë
Over the past few weeks I’ve grown accustomed to the “crunch crunch” of a sea of leaves starting as soon as I step out the patio door to fulfill my daily ritual of filling our bird feeders each morning. Fall is unquestionably in the air, as well as at our feet. This season of the year is definitely my favorite, with winter a close second. Yes, in my fifties I’m already a bird guy AND have always been a lover of cold and winter. Admittedly, I’m an odd duck!
In this season the heat of the summer is gone, the colors of nature around us explode, and yes, for the son of a high school teacher and coach and one who grew up around sports and who played the game for ten years, there is football. In recent years I’ve found Fall’s place in the life cycle of the seasons especially poignant, as a hospice chaplain and grief support specialist and now one who works with those impacted by traumatic death. The leaves fall, light and warmth are waning, and darkness and death/hibernation are coming. This dance of life and death has and continues to fascinate me. As the author of John’s Gospel wrote two millennia ago, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain, but if it dies it bears much fruit.”
This dance: Death and life, joy and sorrow, light and darkness, etc. seems so evident to me in these November days. The inevitable “Both And” of life as we experience it. Welcome to our life. Welcome to our world. Welcome to our humanness. My existential wrestling with such things doesn’t even begin to encompass how events in our nation and around world reflect this reality in particular ways this year. What I, what you, and what we collectively DO with this reality, if anything at all, is well, up to us. I have no grand nuggets of wisdom in my backpack to share. What I do know is that I find beauty in the falling and fallen leaves and know intuitively within myself that as we journey toward winter, spring will come. Perhaps a blessing from Celtic theologian John O’Donohue’s Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom can, as we sometimes say each week at the Table, give us strength for the journey ahead.
On the day when the weight deadens on your shoulders and you stumble,
May the clay dance to balance you. And when your eyes freeze behind the grey window and the ghost of loss gets into you,
May a flock of colours, indigo, red, green and azure blue come to awaken in you a meadow of delight,
May the nourishment of the earth be yours, may the clarity of light be yours,
May the fluency of the ocean be yours, may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow wind work these words of love around you, an invisible cloak to mind your life.
Brian is grateful for the beauty of this fall season, awaits with great anticipation the first snow of the upcoming winter, and especially loves his new role as “Pops.”