Songs of the Seasons

November’s Song¹

The leaves changing to deep, intense colors—blood red, sunshine yellow, electric orange—express the passion of life’s last exclamation before surrendering. Life’s goodbye. I feel an empathy, a communion, an organic connection to trees. As I watch my hair grow white (sadly, no reds, yellows, oranges; I go out with a whimper, not a bang…), feel my limbs creak and groan under the strain of the north wind, as I observe the obvious decay of my memory and vitality, I draw comfort from my friends the trees.

One of the most poignant and evocative moments of the fall, a moment that stops me, breath abated, is the gentle flutter and fall of a single, solitary leaf. Followed by the seemingly capricious and hypnotic flutter of another. And another. Tens of thousands of leaves on a tree, each scribing their unique trajectory to the earth.

December’s Song

The transition to December’s song are trees, denuded, but surrounded by a blanket of fallen leaves. It lasts only for a day or two, before the color is drained by decay, the leaves swept away by the wind into piles of soon-to-be compost. The last, faint kiss.

Winter trees, shed of their life, reveal the bare, skeletal expression of a lifetime of storms, struggles, and strivings captured in the frozen movements and entanglements of the bare limbs and branches.²

Winter trees speak truth. Everywhere I turn, they stand, reminding me of my fate; a fate that looms. But the trees also reassure that I am not alone. My fate is shared with all life, however humble and brief, that has burst from our fertile earth. My good fortune is to have been given awareness of my life, of my seasons, and to bear witness to the experience of the seasons that all life, in their unique form, experience. I go down in a crowd. Can I, through the pain and suffering that usually accompanies the end of life, draw some measure of solace knowing that I join a wide, well-trod path? That pain and suffering are the grease to ease the passage into the night? That the adventure of life exacts its measure of payment? Can I…?

In Blackwater Woods
Mary Oliver

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let go,
to let go.

1. In St. Louis. This song is sung at different calendar times in other locals.
2. I realize that trees are not “dead” and life will return anew in the spring. But the seasonal round of trees and plants is an obvious cousin to the human round of birth, bloom and decline. I suspect that the pervasive belief in reincarnation, whether in an afterlife or in a return to earth in a new form, draws its power from the seasonal cycle.