To See A Blessing in the Falling

With more than a stiff breeze blowing it's no surprise there are leaves surfacing the pond and the grassy shores surrounding.  It is the heart of autumn -- the season I recently saw a sign describing as "the year's last and loveliest smile" -- and the temperatures are dropping as the colors are warming.  The geese paddling the waters sweep the foliage shoreward with the rippling assistance of the fountain spray out near the center, but their's is increasingly a full time job as more and more leaves surrender their hold on all they have known to keep them steady and aloft.

One of the voices in a conversation this morning accounted for the resistance to certain changes and new directions in being and doing within the faith community as the form that active lament takes when, little by little, people experience the loss of one after another anchoring principle or understanding.  He wondered aloud if the resistance had less to do with the issue or direction itself than with the cumulative weight of loss that leaves one feeling tottering or naked.  I think he is on to something.  Our elastic capacities vary, I suppose, but most of us eventually find ourselves taut and endangered at the extent to which we are called upon to stretch, fearing that if we allow our hold to snap altogether all that is real will be lost.

I don't for a minute begin to understand what this means, but I wonder if the leaves might hold out to us a larger, alternative vision.  It is their role, after all, to serve the tree for a season, not for an eternity.  They absorb all they are able, converting and sharing what they can, while they can, then cede the future to subsequent generations.  And in their very falling -- whether on water or the ground beneath the boughs -- occasions the giving of a still deeper gift in the decaying transformation into the very soil itself.  New nourishment; new foundation.

On the one hand it isn't very pleasant to include myself conceptually in the composting circle of life.

But on the other hand, the notion of it is intensely satisfying.

To offer what I can for as long as I can, not begrudging what I can't, or what follows behind me.  And when it's time, to entrust what remains to the breadth of all there is.  And -- colorfully I can only hope -- rest, with the leaves, in peace.