Honoring the Cycle

Planting in the fall is a commitment, belief, and hope in nature’s rhythms.

I stood on the hill today, soaking in the shifting colors of the trees around us. Their lush leaves are still present, but their shift is visible now. We are just weeks from the peak, and the harvest moon will be here on Friday. It makes autumn feel more than real but tangible to me now. Still, I feel I am holding two seasons of nature and self. I can still see some of the birds from summer. The zinnias and dahlias still bloom, and the cosmos float over the garden. Yet I can see the tomatoes struggling to produce the final fruit from summer. I can smell the cool, earthy decay of the forest coming off the north wind and the dew that will soon be morning frost soaking the ground beneath me on the trail. Everything is here right now. I can sense the entire cycle being completed and moving simultaneously.

Yet here I am, planting blueberry bushes. It isn’t something you think of doing. Planting in the fall is a commitment, belief, and hope in nature’s rhythms. Believing that these immovable plants that look to be fading with their red leaves and signs of dormancy will leaf again and offer life-giving harvests on their tiny branches even after a long winter would seem an insane thing to believe in if you didn’t know how things move on our planet. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else to honor this season, both in nature and self.