I am feeling a different relationship with Fall this year. If you’ve been following my blog for more than a year, you’ll know it’s not my favourite season. I grieve for the loss of warmth, and feel the increased effort required to function in the colder weather. The plants I love are dying. And because I live where I do, fall is just the lead-in to six months of cold and limited daylight.
Usually I struggle with this season. I feel an inner resistance to the losses and increasing hardship I feel in it.
This year, I’m feeling more ease with what is. Yes, I’m feeling the colder temperatures and noticing the dying plants. Yet, somehow, that noticing is accompanied with a sense of rightness. In the wheel of the year, it is time for these changes, these little deaths.
As always, I’m noticing my beloved trees. No matter where I am, or what time of year it is, trees feel like my companions in life. Noticing them helps me notice my inner self, grounds me in the reality that exists beyond words.
This year, it has been necessary for me to spend an extended period of time away from my home province. I’ve been in the northern foothills of the Rockies, where tree-lined hills catch my attention any time I look into the distance. I’m seeing not so much individual trees, as I do at home, but rather entire wooded areas.
When we first arrived here, the great swaths of variegated green were breathtaking. As summer has given way to fall, the swaths have given way to patches of gold amid the various greens highlighted with flecks of orange. The patchwork shifts day by day, so the vista is always slightly different. Today I noticed that the gold now dominates, with great splotches of dark green from conifers, and brown now scattered amid the orange.
In my love affair with trees, I have learned that the colours of fall leaves are actually the leaves’ true colours. In spring and summer, chlorophyll gives the leaves their green, and helps the trees absorb energy from the sun as they undergo the process of photosynthensis. As the season changes, sunlight is less abundant, and the trees’ energy turns inward to prepare for winter survival, the chlorophyll is no longer needed or even beneficial. It fades from the leaves, revealing to us their natural state.
I love this illustration of the process of becoming increasingly familiar with my own authenticity, with the truth of my own soul.
My personality, what some would call my ego, is necessary for my functioning in life. My habits of reaction and the way I present myself outwardly have formed in response to my experiences, and they have helped me feel safe as I navigate the world around me.
Soul work is the process of becoming aware of my personality habits and reactions. Soul practices, such as rest, meditation, prayer and spiritual direction, help me learn to see these patterns. As I notice them without judgement, I grow in the ability to choose whether to follow my pattern or cultivate a new way of relating and being. I become willing to release what no longer serves me.
The metaphor of the leaves helps me remember that, while it’s important to do the work of cultivating awareness, the process itself has its own wisdom. The tree doesn’t have to decide when to reduce chlorophyll or when to drop its leaves. It simply surrenders to the season, and the leaves bud, open, flourish, and release as appropriate. Similarly, as I do the work of my soul practices, the wisdom of grace meets me and produces the awareness or fruit appropriate to my season.
As much as I love the greens of spring and summer, I do also appreciate the unique beauty of fall when the leaves’ authenticity, if you will, is revealed. So it is with our soul-work. As we remain faithful to our own unfolding, our authentic being becomes ever more evident. Nothing is more beautiful than a human being fully, wholly themselves.
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