Today a tumult of autumnal leaves tumbled, hundreds of them lying golden as bright spilt coins on the dark rain-soaked lane as I walk along. Each year, this leaf-tumble day arrives, a day when nature seems to me to decisively shift her mood from summer to autumn, and I wonder at the timing of it. As I wonder, I find myself tracking the ancestral lines of those golden leaves in the lane. From their windblown backs I drift upward, backward from earth to twig. From twig tip inward, my senses seeking sap lines running towards ancient heartwood. I hear songs of the mother tree, her myriad of stories heard and whispered to the winds through the centuries, a hypnotic rising and falling of lives and loves and seasons ever turning.
A glimpse, an acorn lying glossy in a wood long ago, in an autumn long past. Enfolded within its tiny package lie kaleidoscopic unfurlings of grace and might and beauty. Lost in this acorn’s nutbrown dreaming I stumble upon this very moment, this moment of my standing and wondering. Behind this moment, an infinity of seasonal doorways, each opening on to another, of longago autumns, of feathery frosts and wild rains birthing ancient springtimes, the changing of each circling season impeccably wrapped in an earlier turning. This circular songline is both unfathomable to my quicktime mind, grasping for the definition of endings and beginnings, and deeply kindred to my own beating heart.
Published in 2019 Earth Pathways Diary
Art by Gilly Hopson ‘Autumn Glow’
Woman on the Edge 
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