Season of leaves

 The other day I found myself up on a ladder, scraping some trim for painting before the snow flies. It was actually a nice place to be. It was a beautiful fall day, wind from the south. Two hawks, riding the thermals over the hill in the back. Even the sound of the wind blowing through the turning leaves sounded different, drier that it had back in the summer, just a few weeks ago.

While I was looking up, scanning for raptors, I saw a small yellow leaf, high up in the sky over our house. How it could get so high I really don't understand. Sometimes leaves seem self propelled, just like the birds and the dragonflies.

The following first appeared in this blog on 11/18/11.

Clear and cold. Two weeks ago on Sunday, I got home from the Zen Center in the afternoon. Allyn was a couple of hours behind me, returning from visiting her mother in Ohio. I wanted to finish cleaning up the mess from the various wood piles I had created in the back yard before she returned. I hauled bark and chips from the back to the burn pile we have in a field nearby. As I was returning from the burn pile, I saw two oak leaves high in the sky down by the bridge. They must have been 100 feet in the air. I couldn't feel any breeze, it must have been above the tree line. But they came toward me, slowly fluttering in the air. They would start to head down, but would catch a thermal again, and rise up to the original level. One finally headed to earth along the road, but the other kept coming, fluttering, falling, rising, dancing on the wind. 

I had watched as I was hauling the wheelbarrow back, but the leaf had been in the air a long time, a number of minutes at least; longer than any leaf I had ever seen before. I finally put down the wheelbarrow, and gave the leaf my full attention. It kept coming, floating above the road, over the back yard and the house, over the front yard, and finally over my head heading east. It parted ways with the zephyr along the fence line, and slowly fell to the earth, landing in Allyn's flower garden near the old apple tree. As my eyes finally parted from the oak leaf, I looked up and saw the waxing moon, like mother of pearl, rising over the Green Mountains.

Soon the child's clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines, and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day...we become seekers.

The Snow Leopard

Peter Matthiessen