Two photos, before and after. The first is of a tree in our yard and the glories of the red leaves. The beauty of the fall colors in the Pacific Northwest in the USA are stunning. Reds, oranges, greens, yellows abound for several weeks in a feast of the splendor of life and creation. But then the second photo, the after. This happens as winter weather arrives, and within just a few days, the tree is stripped bare with the beautiful leaves in piles on the ground below.

Again this year the process happened. The dazzling colors, and the barren tree as in the second photo. And it happens every year, far back into the past and far into the future. That is what seasons are all about. Things live and sprout and blossom, and things fall and die. Beauty and life, and barrenness and death, go side by side, season after season. And so it is with our lives.

For us this year with just a month to go, it has been a year of many losses. Early in the year there was a traumatic death in our extended family of a younger person, my two last uncles from my parents’ generation died a few months apart, and several other friends and acquaintances from several different age groups. In October the beloved founder of the mission we have served with for 44 years passed away at the age of 88. I’m sure losses of different kinds have been there for many reading this post. Each loss a precious leaf falling to the ground, bringing various kinds of grief and pain.

Yet with the leaves falling and the colors lost, another season begins and a cycle of new life in the death. The stripping of the winter season can be painful in our lives, but it also holds the promise of the new coming. Parker Palmer, one of my favorite teachers and authors, writes ‘The spiritual journey is an endless process of engaging life as it is, stripping away our illusions about ourselves, our world, and the relationship of the two, moving closer to reality as we do.’ The seasons of winter in our lives are times when illusions can fall away like the leaves, leaving not only reality but also the dreams that continue to be worth living for. One of the illusions we all can face is that we won’t face loss, or death. When in reality, no matter how old we are, there are always losses and deaths to embrace and contend with.

Later in the same book by Palmer, ‘On the Brink of Everything’, he quotes the poet Ranier Maria Rilke from his poem Autumn, ‘The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up. as if orchards were dying high in space. Each leaf falls as if it were motioning “no”.’ (pg. 165). When we face a leaf falling, a lost color for another year, or in the case of a death of a friend or relative a lot longer, the pain and grief of a ‘no’ is so difficult to embrace. Rilke ends this same poem with the truth that ‘Yet there is Someone, whose hands infinitely calm, holding up all this falling.’ In all the losses, there is grace and mercy in knowing the caring and infinitely calm hands of our loving Creator and Sustainer of life even in death.

Parker Palmer, in watching his own leaves fall and the beauty dying, as well as his own life of 79 years beginning to fade, comes to this truth: ‘I began to understand a simple fact: all the “falling” that’s going on out there is full of promise. Seeds are being planted and leaves are being composted as earth prepares for yet another uprising of green.‘ (pg. 166). In the leaves falling, there is the promise of new life, an ‘uprising of green’, and indeed the seeds of it! That is also true in our lives, as the losses and deaths in all their pain and lament become new seeds for the future life we are promised. A life that may be tomorrow, or in eternity.

What leaves are falling in your life? What losses have you faced this year, or deaths? Where are you beginning to sense new hope, even in the stripping and barrenness?