Autumn Journal: What Remains is Radiant

The wind comes clean across the valley this morning.

No scent of honeysuckle.  No hum of bees. Only the sharp breath of leafless trees and the hush that follows long after their falling. Above, the sky has shed its summer weight and the gold of autumn is pale.  Light falls thinner and slants long and low.  Shadows stretch at noon and refuse to shrink.

The sun returns to its anniversary place on the ridge—the year’s circle closing. 

This morning, I move through the house slowly. These hands that once gathered—firewood, children, blackberries—now know only release. They fall from toothbrush and comb, mug and fork, mouse and pen, wheelchair controls. Each letting go is practice for the next.

Outside, frost has worked its way into the edges of things. The last goldenrod leans into sleep. The milkweed pods are torn open and empty now, their seeds long carried off on the breeze.  The sheltering thicket by the patio, unburdoned of its frost wilted-leaves, reveals its architecture: an elegant latticework of gray stems, patient and enduring.

Yes, there is grief in release. 

Not the sharp kind, but the slow ache of watching what you love slip away. I loved the weight of a book in my hands, the embrace of a child, the resistance of earth against a shovel, the challenges of a career, the simple miracle of buttoning my own shirt. This is the ache of autumn itself—tragic, necessary, beautiful, preparing the ground. The heart resists, then yields, then finds, in yielding, the unexpected lightness of empty hands.

There is also freedom in release.

And it is through this freedom that gratitude arises—gratitude for this long teaching of loss, for the insight that came not despite my suffering, but because of it. Gratitude that, in this gradual dissolution, I was not separate from the world, but drawn more deeply into its breathing.

I witnessed what is: morning light pooling gold in the grass, frost stars scattered across fallen leaves, the earth alive with its ten thousand small movements. And I knew—not from books or teachers, but from bare attention—that we are not observers of this world; we are expressions of it.

I knew that the golden light shining through a spring oak is not separate from the oak, or the earth in which it grows, or the eye that sees it.
All of it breathes with one breath.
All is one.
All is luminous.
There is nothing that is not one.
God is not a word for this. God is this.

Dressed for the chill, I set out in my wheelchair, engineered marvelously enough to grant one more passage to the rugged forest path. Today I’ll travel the full circle, knowing it may be the last time before these hands fail the controls entirely, or before the disease completes its work. I don’t circle to return but to close this ring with intention, the way one might close a note to a beloved friend.

The path unwinds beneath my wheels. Each tree, each stone, each bend in the trail receives its moment of recognition. Goodbye, and thank you. The circle completes itself slowly.

Here, where spring brought jewelweed and snakeroot. There, where summer deer bedded with their fawns in the bamboo. The trees wear their nakedness without apology. The stream releases each drop of water without question. No cardinal yearns for yesterday’s song.

Letting go is not surrender; it is participation.  Not forgetting, but joyful remembering. Not suffering loss, but allowing transformation.

Watch how the oak releases each leaf—not in defeat, but in completion. How the stream gives itself entirely to the sea. How morning glories climb all summer, only to release their hold when frost whispers: enough.

Letting go is the soft unclenching of what was once held tight in your fists. It is the honoring of the bright passage between what was and what comes. It is the recognition that the gift was never in the grasping, but in the moment when life flowed through our fingers—like clear stream water, like light.

What remains is not the flower,
but the shape of our attention when it bloomed.
Not the strength,
but how it served.
Not the life,
but how deeply we dared to live it.

This light needs no body to carry it. It was here before these eyes opened. It will shine long after they close.

In every blooming redbud tree’s fire,
in every bright birdsong floating through sunlight,
in every grass blade shimmering with frost—
what remains is radiant.