Mr. Dickey gave us a choice: serve an hour detention or write out the dictionary definition of the word fall three times. I made the wrong choice and it made all the difference.
We packed into the station wagon for a long road trip with minimal provisions and promised only occasional bathroom pit stops. The grand pageant awaits, a rolling canvas in reds, yellows and the infrequent pine greens, strung together on rolling back roads. But for the whole wonder of it, I’ll never remember a single leaf.
The days fall different now / Frost glissenviels the earth / And where I shrink in the coming of winter / Others anticipate the arrival of spring
Following in Adam’s footsteps, starting in 1735, Carl von Linné began naming everything in sight, tagging all of nature. Now, with a guidebook in hand, this leaf strewn path would have been like a walk through an encyclopedia. With camera at the ready, perhaps it was something different.
1992 World Series: game two in Atlanta. The U.S. Marine Corps Color Guard presented the Canadian flag upside down, cause “that’s how leaves fall.” The Toronto Blue Jays went on to win the series: sweet.
…to be in the face of winter’s struggles, they resign to the earth’s own warmth, these heroes from summer.
From its first planting in Genesis 2:8–9, its simply ʿēṣ haddaʿat ṭov wārāʿ, “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” Fig? Pomegranate? Maybe even the Latin translated Apple? No one knows exactly what type of tree. No matter… I just hope its leaves changed with the fall.
Here at the edge of the woods, do we see the forest or the tree? The leaves of the leaf? Do we look at how nature is or look from how we are? Does it matter, so long as we see?
Bring a meditative wabi-sabi moment to eyelevel. This autumn walk rendered to the camera’s quick, unflinching response. What is accident is also ever-present.
I get roses–the thorny bastards–all tangled intertwining, but crowned in the colours of forgiveness. Leaves–in their quiet collective solitude–confuse me.
At the turn of this century, shaman desert explorers discovered a glowing halo of light emanating from a cut of rock on Mount Karkom. Could this be the burning bush through which G-d spoke to Moses? If so, perhaps G-d does speak through leaves.
We witness the forest’s slow motion Technicolor dream as it slumbers into the coming winter. The visioning explodes before our minds’ eye, whether we blink or even dare close our eyes …or not.
The borough sweeps through with these big vacuum trucks, collecting curbside leaves. The kids have abandoned jumping into these piles long ago. The trucks now dump their loads on the hillside behind the little league baseball field out in the park. Throughout the month, the autumn’s wealth piles higher, mounting a huge cliff of decaying debris, so much the better to leap into.
Yves Montand sang the tune Les Feuilles Mortes (words by Jacques Prévert/music by Joseph Kosma) in Marcel Carné’s 1946 film Gates of the Night. The Dead Leaves. You might know it by the Anglicized title, Autumn Leaves. (My favorite version is by Patricia Kaas.) Autumn leaves / dead leaves: I ask, but are these fallen leaves dead to the soil?
He haunts the façade of Rosslyn Chapel (of DaVinci Code fame), his face of stone etched with intwining leaves. He is the Green One, the wild spirit of humankind hidden amongst the woods. And when the leaves have fallen, who can say but he might too be hiding amongst the leaf scatterings inhabiting the ground.
Mr. Newton – an apple hit him on the head. If it has been a falling leaf instead, gravity would still exist.
It’s funny…this whole thing came about some twelve years ago, during a family walk in a Pittsburgh park named after a robber baron. I followed the brilliant path before, illuminating one footstep after another. Funny too that it took me over a decade to realize what was there.
Fallen leaves are simply nature’s graffiti. …interesting then what caught the camera’s imagination. And, always, the curl of the leaf takes us to a different plane.
How does this take shape? The light shortens and the nights fall to chill. The wooden arteries shrink in, closes off the leaf’s lifeline. And now… is it the red made from its sugar, the yellow that was always in the ready or just the absence of green that we see? And still, what of brown?
Universes hide in there. Look closely. Are these not stars in their own systems, with these white dots of decay? Expanding, exploding across the leaf over time and, in some magnificent arrangement, occasionally giving way to a hole, a space, and, through it, another universe revealed.