Wind sweeps through the valley today.
For weeks, autumn held its breath. Black walnut, maple, and oak leaves hung still, their green fading to yellow, red, orange, and gold—colors that had always been there, waiting for release beneath summer’s chlorophyll mask. In the calm air, leaves loosened but lingered, clinging to branch and twig.
Today, they fly.
Red oak leaves spiral down like tiny helicopters. Yellow walnut leaves tumble and dance. The air fills with movement—a storm of color against the gray sky. They land on patio stones, drift across the lawn, and settle on forest paths.
Soon, these leaves will dry to brittleness. Deer will crunch through them, browsing their last feast before winter’s fast. Squirrels will rustle and dig. When the rains arrive, the leaves will soften and mat down, becoming shelter for field mice, hiding places for salamanders waiting out winter. By spring, earthworms will have worked their slow magic—turning leaf into soil, soil into root, root into bud, and bud into leaf again.
Each falling leaf carries this promise.
I wheel onto the patio. The cool wind pushes against me, tugging at my sleeves. Leaves scratch across the cold slate. One dogwood leaf catches the slanted afternoon light—bright as flame for an instant before it drops.
The air smells of earth and endings—of beginnings, too.
How many autumns have these oaks seen? A hundred? Two? Their time moves like sap, while ours flashes past like lightning in a summer sky. What the trees know in their heartwood, we glimpse only in moments like this: everything flows. The tree feeds the soil that feeds the tree. The leaf that falls becomes the leaf that grows. Many forms, one life breathing.
This truth lives in every gust—not in some distant eternity, but here, now, in the crunch beneath my wheels, in the cold touch of wind on skin, in a yellow leaf spinning to land in the thicket. Constant becoming.
The wind pushes harder now, and I feel how it wants to lift me too. This body grows lighter each day. Bones rise to the surface like rock from weathered earth. Muscles release their grip and wither. The boundary between self and world softens, like autumn rain on fallen leaves. The same force that pulls leaves from branches whispers against my neck: Let go. Rejoin the dance.
Perhaps this is all the wisdom we need—to release our grip like autumn leaves, eyes wide to the limitless life that has always held us.
Not separate from it.
Part of it.
Falling and flying, both.