Flying Leaves

[Michael Gray]

​‘Edge of the Future’ – Image by Maria Karysheva –  Pixabay https://pixabay.com/photos/autumn-leaves-foliage-autumn-leaves-5291453/

 

It’s not just that I am stardust from an exploding supernova that cloaked our planet with a tapestry of living beings.

It’s not just the discovery of language and fire, and the gathering of our forebears into tribes, villages and cities.

It’s not just that I was born on this planet, recapitulating in the womb the evolutionary journey of our ancestors: the first one-celled amoeba, fish swimming in ancient seas, reptilian brains stirring with thoughts and feelings before my prefrontal cortex announced “Wait, I’m the one who knows.”

There’s also how I embrace, or ignore, this net of being into which I have appeared, like the unlikely roll of a million dice all coming up sixes.

A memory came back to me a couple of mornings ago. It was of an experience that must have happened more than once growing up in Canada. I was walking near the home I grew up in. It was autumn, still my favorite time of year, and leaves from elm trees, poplars and maples lay thick upon the ground.

A gust of wind lifted the leaves up all around me, making the air visible; filling my field of vision, and reminding me that life is full of surprises. All I have to do is pay attention.

In this memory, the leaves must have fallen in the immediate days before, because as we know from the seasons of our lives, once the rains of autumn come and fall over the land, those crisp, light leaves wafting through the air in their meandering paths and piling up in heaps that barely touch the ground, soon turn into clumps of earth-bound food for next year’s mushrooms and crocuses.

In this image, blown in from another time of life, like leaves lying so lightly upon the ground that they are still beings of the air, the past had not yet coalesced into stories I tell about days lived under trees and among tall buildings. That past spoke of a world that hasn’t settled down, hasn’t yet committed to a version of the way things have to be.

Now, if I can only bring something of that memory of walking among blowing leaves into this time and place, where so often it feels that the rains have already fallen and packed together what was once in flight. If I can only keep remembering that it makes perfect sense to wonder who I am, because like the leaves of autumn, there’s something here that hasn’t yet touched the ground.

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