Releasing
My yard is covered in leaves all of the sudden. Just a few days ago, I was thinking how green the trees were. Today I am reminded how quickly change comes.
I’ve never been exceptionally fond of change. I like structure and familiarity. I value what I have come to know as “reliable.” Consistency brings me comfort. Still, in every year, Nature gifts us with a time for “letting go” and reminds us of the importance of change in nourishing the future.
As I watch the leaves scatter, I am aware of the pieces of my life that lay strewn across the canvas of my being at this moment – old friends who have moved on with little or no explanation, dreams and visions that never quite got off the ground, beliefs about life, and love, and relationship, that have been proven inaccurate – aspects of existence that have changed in ways I could not have predicted or prepared for. All of this lies on the barren ground of my autumnal self, dis-integrating.
It is time to let go. When fall comes, the trees pull in their sap, calling this source energy back to the roots and base. They close off the connection from branch to leaf, and allow a “falling away” to occur. I wonder if the leaf mourns the tree, or the tree grieves the exiting leaf. It looks so simple and easy. All that is necessary is a gentle breeze to help detach one from the other, it seems.
It is Spirit that provides the breeze I need to make my own separations. It is the breath of the Divine, arriving in a blustery gust, that sings to me, ” What has been will nourish what is yet to come. Let change happen.”
It is time to de-compose my story about sameness and change. It is time for a falling away of what must become something else. A gentle whisper, like the cool wind dancing leafy spirals across my yard, speaks of gratitude and sweet memories, and I feel the deepening. I call my own life blood back to my roots, pulling from the center of my history, the strength to go within.
All that has been feeds all that I am, composing itself in spring, growing through the summers of my life, and de-composing again in fall to become rich, earthy compost that sustains my next becoming.
What is released is never truly gone. It simply changes form to serve a greater purpose. Perhaps change is not so bad after all.