Nature Speaks

Yesterday, I found a single leaf resting against the dark roots of a tree. Its edges glowed with fire – green fading into orange, orange into red – a quiet flame fallen to earth. It stopped me.

The first leaf of autumn: a small but certain sign that the season of letting go has begun.

Nature never clings. It does not argue with time. A tree knows when to hold, and when to release. What looks like an ending is only another form of continuity – nourishment returning to the soil, space made for what is yet to come.

Carl Jung once wrote: “In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.” Seen this way, decay is not destruction but re-ordering: structure dissolving into the possibility of new form.

We, too, carry things beyond their season – thoughts that weigh us down, habits that no longer serve, stories we keep repeating though they no longer feel true. The difficulty is not in letting go, but in believing there will be enough left when we do. Yet the trees teach us otherwise: emptiness is not absence but clearing.

The poet John Burroughs saw it clearly: “How beautifully leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days.” Even the falling carries radiance. Hermann Hesse echoed the lesson: “Some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go.” Strength is not grasping but surrender, not resistance but release.

What the trees enact each year is not a tragedy but a trust. Their loosening is not loss, but renewal in progress. In releasing what is finished, they open themselves to what is coming.

As the branches begin their slow surrender, I find myself asking what I might let go of this season. And I wonder the same for you. Perhaps the first fallen leaf is not merely a sign of autumn, but an invitation to re-examine what we cling to, and what might quietly be set down.

A Gentle Practice

On your next walk, find a tree that draws you. Pause beside it. Place your hand against its bark, and breathe slowly three times. With each breath out, imagine releasing something you no longer need – a worry, a phrase you keep repeating, a weight in your body. Let the tree hold it. Let the earth take it back. Notice how your hand rests a little lighter, and how the air seems to move more freely around you.

As Rumi whispered across centuries: “Try to accept the changing seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the changing seasons that pass over your fields.”

Like the first leaf, may we learn the art of release – not as an ending, but as the beginning of change.