Late Autumn Reflections

In autumn countless branches and leaves
retreat into the sea of Death--
in the garden the crow clothed in black like a mourner
laments over the withered green.
Then again from the Lord of the land
comes the command to Non-existence . . .

Brother, sister, collect your wits and consider:
moment by moment, continually,
there is autumn and spring within you.
Behold the garden of the heart,
green and moist and fresh . . .
--Rumi (tr. Kabir and Camille Helminski)


The trees around me are mostly dormant now, taking a break from making all that food for themselves with the help of the sun. I feel dormant today, too, as I do in times when my natural inclinations follow the flow of the natural world and tell me to be still, sit quietly with myself, or just watch.

I was outside watching when I noticed, in deeper pools of a shallow creek, reflections of the bare tree limbs above. In these images the oak leaves that have fallen lie in random patterns around and just below the surface of the water. The leaves, not long ago, flourished on the trees above. Now the brown, fallen foliage will begin to decompose and build soil that will continue to nurture the trees that bore them, and later on, new trees.

The images change as I move from one place to another, and the light changes, and what I see changes.

Large changes have passed through the ground of my own life this year. I retired in the spring. Then, one daughter passed through a divorce. Another daughter gave birth to a new granddaughter.  After years of suffering the effects of a terrible stroke 11 years earlier, my mother died. Life is always moving, elements falling away, impulses rebuilding. Moments may look stable to us, but give them time, and the illusion of constancy dissolves.

In the photos, the trees are reflections, and the leaves are solid objects, though they're both part of the same pattern. And the leaves can look more or less substantial--the ones underneath the surface of the water are  ghostly, the ones above, sometimes softly focused.

A close look at the image just above shows a bit of gravel across the top, rocks of the earth agitated for ages over the creek bed, first cracked apart, then smoothed by long years of being tossed in the motion in the water. Processes appear in layers, and within the layers themselves.

Movement goes on, even at winter's door. Under the water, in the air, in the way everything looks and feels. Spring will be back. Now the earth says, notice the silence, and the stillness. Slow your own rhythm, let the stillness in.