Everything Falls
October 30, 2014
“It is the fall. And everything falls — not just the leaves. The temperature falls as the earth again tilts away from the sun. Darkness falls more quickly as the days shorten. Plants droop and dry up and break apart. Trees fall into dormancy and stop growing. Their leaves and seeds fall into the cool air, and then to the ground, where they will rot and root and become something new. This is the season of decay — a word that means “to fall away” — to return to your constituent parts, to what you are made of.”
— Tom Montgomery Fate, Cabin Fever: A Suburban Father’s Search for the Wild
Without Regret
November 16, 2013
Tree-Watching Project: How to Die Gently, Like Leaves
November 11, 2012
“How pleasant to walk over beds of these fresh, crisp, rustling fallen leaves — young hyson, green tea, clean, crisp, and wholesome! How beautiful they go to their graves! how gently lay themselves down and turn to mould! — painted of a thousand hues and fit to make the beds of us living. So they troop to their graves, light and frisky. They put on no weeds. Merrily they go scampering over the earth, selecting their graves, whispering all through the woods about it. They that waved so loftily, how contentedly they return to dust again and are laid low, resigned to lie and decay at the foot of the tree and afford nourishment to new generations of their kind, as well as to flutter on high! How they are mixed up, all species, — oak and maple and chestnut and birch! they are about to add a leaf’s breadth to the depth of the soil. We are all the richer for their decay. Nature is not cluttered with them. She is a perfect husbandman; she stores them all.”
— Henry David Thoreau, Journals, October 20, 1853
Autumn is that elegiac time of year, and fallen leaves are its emblem. I recently read (in a blog I follow called “The Improvised Life“) about an intriguing art installation by Jane Hammond consisting of handmade leaves, each inscribed with the name of a U.S. soldier killed in Iraq. This memorial sculpture is called Fallen, and it seemed fitting to share it with you today, Veteran’s Day, when we honor all service men and women, living and dead. You can follow the links to read more about this piece of art and see it installed in its last exhibition.
The Signature Mark of Autumn
November 19, 2011
“The signature mark of autumn has arrived at last with the rains: orange of pumpkin, orange persimmon, orange lichen on rocks and fallen logs; a copper moon hung low over the orchard; moist, ruddy limbs of the madrone, russet oak leaf, storm-peeled redwood, acorns emptied by squirrels and jays; and mushrooms, orange boletes, Witch’s Butter sprouting on rotted oak, the Deadly Galerina, and of course, chanterelles, which we’ll eat tonight with pasta, goat cheese, and wine.”
— Gary Young, “The Signature Mark of Autumn”
Moldering Moments of Fall
October 17, 2011
Fall Song
by Mary Oliver
Another year gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,
the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows, unmattering back
from the particular island
of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere
except underfoot, moldering
in that black subterranean castle
of unobservable mysteries – roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water. This
I try to remember when time’s measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumn
flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay – how everything lives, shifting
from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.