The Falling: A Meditation on Leaves, Loss, and the Wild Soul

From the window of my writing room, where the light slants low and golden through the October haze, I watch the leaves surrender. They choose this descent, not as victims of some cruel wind, but as an act of faith in the unseen. As I sit here, pen in hand, the world outside my glass unfolds like a poem in slow motion. A cascade of amber, crimson, and faded gold whispers secrets to the earth below. In this watching, I feel pulled into the rhythm of release, that ancient dance where holding on proves the true illusion, and letting go opens the door to what endures.

Picture a single oak, its branches etched like the veins of an old lover's hand against the paling sky. The leaves, once fervent in their summer grip, now loosen one by one. A gentle, insistent breeze coaxes them free, and they spiral downward in lazy arabesques. They twist through the air, as if remembering the joy of flight, before they touch the ground. No haste marks their falling, no regret lines their curling edges. They drift like half-forgotten dreams, released from the tree's fierce embrace when their season's work concludes. They join the others in a rustling carpet, a mosaic of what was, beautifully blessed in its transformation into mulch, its slow alchemy back to soil.

At my desk, a small altar of ink and paper amid half-read books, I sense the philosophy of these leaves. They do not cling; they trust the cycle. In their descent, they teach the art of bareness, the exquisite vulnerability of standing stripped, with branches splayed like questions to the winter stars. We resemble such trees, do we not? We carry the foliage of our lives: roles worn like seasonal finery, memories hoarded against the chill, identities polished to ward off the ache of exposure. Yet autumn arrives unbidden, with its soft decree to release. Let the golden banners of old wounds fall, the crimson banners of loves that have served their time, the rust-tinged banners of outdated dreams. Only then does the wind sweep through, finding us bare, and in that bareness, fully alive.

This spectacle signals no mere decay; it summons the soul's deeper wildness. I think of John Moriarty, the Kerry-born mystic who gazed into the Irish earth as if it were a mirror to the divine. With a shaman's heart and a philosopher's tongue, Moriarty warned of the peril in taming the untamed within. He believed that without wildness around us, the wildness inside us withers, and if that inner wildness dies, we lose something vital. He understood the land's language, how its bogs, mountains, and falling leaves speak of cyclical time, not the linear march of our clocks. For Moriarty, autumn offered not loss but a homecoming to the liminal space, where myths breathe and the soul rediscovers its roots in the humus of the world.

I imagine Moriarty sitting on a windswept hill, watching leaves like these, murmuring of myths that cradle us. He might speak of the salmon of knowledge leaping against the current, only to yield to the river's flow, or the hazel trees of wisdom dropping their nuts into a sacred pool, feeding the wild wisdom beneath. He wrote of living ecumenically with all things, urging a harmony where human and humus entwine. In his vision, the bareness we fear becomes the threshold to the eternal, the space where the Great Mother gathers our leavings and whispers the promise of spring. Stripped and stark, the branches stand not diminished but prepared, listening for the sap's quiet rise in the dark months ahead.

As I watch from my window, a leaf catches the last ray of sun, glowing like a tiny ember before it tumbles into the understory. It lands among its kin, already softening, already becoming nourishment for roots that delve deeper than we can see. I wonder what foliage I must release today. The grudges that weigh like dead branches? The plans that chain me to false security? The stories of scarcity, when abundance waits in the compost of what falls away? Letting go, Moriarty might say, invokes rather than abandons. It calls forth the wildness sleeping in our bones, the myths murmuring in our blood. By facing the bareness, the raw, wind-kissed silhouette of our truest selves, we touch the timeless, where loss and life embrace as lovers.

Outside, the breeze quickens, and another flurry of leaves begins. The tree bows slightly, as if in gratitude, its form a display of endurance: what falls away makes room for the unseen wing. Here at my desk, I lay down my pen for a moment, to be present with the shedding of the tree. The leaves continue their descent, patient teachers in transit. They remind me that we are not the leaves, fleeting and frail, but the tree, rooted in mystery, ever reaching toward the light that follows the dark.

If this stirs something in you, the ache of release or the call to wildness, pause today. Step outside and feel the earth receive what you offer up. What might bloom in the space you have cleared? The soul knows; it always has.

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