silage

It occurred to be the other day that my wood pile was similar to a Buddhist sand mandala. Maple to ashes. A cornfield is much the same thing. Actually there aren't any more cornfields in Vermont these days. Corn has turned to silage.

the leaves were flying

Yesterday it was really windy. The leaves were flying. The following first appeared in this blog 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, almost full, 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 Not  until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn.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.
Peter Matthiessen

observation

Boats on trailers heading back home from Lake Champlain for the winter. Ski sale at Middlebury High School. Sound of ice pellets hitting dried leaves. Smell of wood smoke.

There is no reality in the absence of observation.
The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
Zen page a day calendar

shiny

Walking in the woods. some of the small, round leaves look like shiny golden coins.

I can feel this heart inside me and I conclude it exists. I can touch this world and I also conclude that it exists. All my knowledge ends at this point. The rest is hypothesis.
Albert Camus
Zen page a day calendar

second season

The fall foliage season is not a static event that concludes on Columbus Day, it is a continuum. Some time after the maple leafs have fallen the oak trees turn.

At about the same point in time, the beech trees reach their peak. Burnt orange seems to be their favorite color.

On the whole, the colors of this second season of the fall foliage extravaganza are usually a little more muted in color, often with a coppery hue. Even the leaves of the blackberry bushes get into the act.

other things

There are events other than turning leaves going on in the area. The corn maze in Rutland town has been available for some time, and the haunted house in Pittsford is up and running. Halloween decorations are seen in most towns, and homes in the region.

the leaves

Contrast is part of the fall foliage story. Sometimes the changing leaves seem brighter when viewed alongside neighboring pine trees.

As some of the leaves start to fall, the contrast with the darkness of branches helps to highlight the leaves remaining.

As the season moves past peak, there are trees that are bare at the top with leaves remaining at the bottom. Sometimes these remaining leaves are the brightest.