Through broad windows, sunrise clouds catch fire.
Pink spreads into red, red deepens into orange, orange brightens into gold. Purple traces the edges like careful brushstrokes. Bare black walnut branches scratch dark lines across the burning sky. Light touches every surface—the oak leaves carpeting the ground, the colors still clinging to maple and beech. This sunrise turns each tree into a torch, releasing autumn’s stored sunlight into the still morning air all at once.
I roll down the ramp into this fall morning’s amber light.
A robin calls first—three clear notes. Cardinals answer from the dogwood. Chickadees scatter their tinkling songs like coins. In the distance, a woodpecker hammers breakfast from dead wood. A golden-crowned kinglet, no bigger than my thumb, whispers from the cedar. Autumn has thinned the choir, but these voices carry the same brightness that once welcomed spring’s first crocus.
From the bamboo grove, a young doe emerges. She crosses the lawn with careful steps, each hoof placed with intention. She pauses, ears swiveling. Morning light transforms her tawny coat into burnished gold. She bends to the clover.
The world stills.
Clouds gather on the horizon, their bellies heavy with rain. Gold dulls to silver. Silver fades to gray. The first drops tap oak leaves like fingertips testing a drum. The maple’s fire goes out. The deer lifts her head. A white tail flashes once before she vanishes into the thicket. One by one, birds fall silent.
Inside, I watch through rain-streaked glass. The same trees that blazed now wear November’s gray cloth.
Beauty arrives without warning and departs without apology.
We are given these moments—sunrise setting trees ablaze, a deer turned to gold, rain arriving like punctuation at a paragraph’s end. Each gift complete. Each gift fleeting.
Let go.
The universe offers its treasures with open hands, then closes them again—not out of cruelty, but because this is the nature of all precious things: they shine brightest in their passing.
Look at how their becoming burns, for a moment, with the brilliance of the eternal—sunrise to rain, flame to shadow, sound to silence, night to day, autumn to winter, flower to fruit, childhood to age, living to death.
Constantly fresh. Eternally new.
This is how light flows through the world.