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The nature of change shines this season

I love the fall, and not just for football and pumpkin spice lattes. My senses are on overload, and it’s the time of year when the natural world around me prepares for slumber that I feel delirious with excitement to be awake and alive.

I love the smells in the air, and I am not just talking pumpkin spice everything. I love the dirt, seasoned with the summers long gone bounty, aromatic as I clean out the garden, its almost like I can inhale the organic process of change into my soul. The air feels cold against my cheeks reminding me how alive I am. The sun’s warmth has a new value, and the golden carpet on the forest floor, like a reflection in a lake of the vibrant trees above, makes change tangible and beautiful at the same time.

There is a stillness in the environment and a quiet in my soul this time of year. It’s a deep exhale of a year’s worth of held breath that allows me to blow the leaves off my soul, like the wind that whistles through the trees in November to make room for new growth.

I spent the better part of my Friday afternoon two weeks ago raking the leaves into orderly piles in my backyard, contemplating the season and its meaning in my life with my tiny sidekick and her pint-sized rake making her own little piles in the front yard of her playhouse.

“Mommy, let’s make leaf angels,” Goose hollered, jumping into the biggest pile, sending my organization into horticultural chaos.

Laying there in the pile of leaves, looking up at the neighbor’s tree, still a few good leaf piles clinging to its branches, Goose asked me why all the leaves don’t fall from the tree at once. So I took the opportunity to use Mother Nature to teach her the lesson that for most things in life, people, animals and trees included, change is a process. If you are lucky, you have time to prepare for change. If it’s thrust upon you, you are lucky if you can accept it.

Is it better to be the leaf that falls from the tree in all of its brilliance with the least resistance, or the leaf that remains through the winter, clinging on for dear life, brittle and afraid to fall at any given moment? It’s a question that each one of us has to answer for ourselves. I’ve been both leaves, and what I have learned is that even the leaf that clings on still eventually falls.

I want to set an example for Goose to go with the flow of the wind when you are the most golden and beautiful. Not to bow out gracefully, but to bow out gloriously.

I decided to put the rake in the garage and take Goose for a walk in the woods. I reached down and plucked her from the pile. With the winter solstice a little less than a month away, I wanted to give her the opportunity to see the beauty in change happening all around us and to go make some leaf angels together before the last bits of yellow turn white with winters frosting.

We walked around our favorite lake and watched an eagle soaring on a cold breeze, fat brook trout dancing side by side in a crystal clear creek and felt the crunch of leaves like bubble wrap underneath our feet. Looking down, Goose picked up an Aspen leaf and held it high in the air, twirling it between her fingers and remarked, “Mommy, the leaves are still beautiful even when they are not on the tree.”

She is right, they are, and it’s because they are not afraid to fall. Dancing along the path in her muck boots she stops again and looks up, still holding onto her leaf.

“And the trees Mommy, they are still beautiful without any leaves.”

Although these two things are synonymous with each other, they are still remarkable independently, and to see Goose grasp this concept in her 4-year-old mind reminds me again why I love this time of year.

The nature of change requires us to bare ourselves just as the tree sheds its leaves. If I cannot get down to the bareness of who I am, I can not ever fully make room for opportunity to experience change and to experience life. Most of the time, the leaves take all of the glory, flowering in the spring, green and lush in the summer and shimmering like jewels in the fall. It’s difficult to see the actual tree underneath the glory of the leaves but, when they fall, the substance of the tree becomes apparent.

I want Goose to be the leaf that takes a flying leap in all of her glory, not the leaf that holds on for dear life clinging to the past. I want to be the branch she shimmers on, and I know that one day if the wind does not pluck her from my bough I will have to shake my branch with love to encourage her to float on the wind of opportunity.

Until that day, we will make leaf angels and marvel at the little buds of opportunity that appear in their place in the spring.

Jenny can be reached at jennyandgooseoutdoors@outlook.com



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