Welcome to Autumn!

I offer you this poem by Wendell Berry for contemplation on this first day of Fall:

Again the air is full

of falling: the fall of the leaves

in the weighty season that brings

all home again to the lowly

miracle from which they came.

Nature, the mother and maker,

requires that life take form,

enflesh itself in the shapes

and habits of the world’s unnumbered

kinds. And then she requires

each one at last to shed

its guise, giving up

its matter to the life to come.

Think of a world of no fall

no gravity calling downward,

homeward, bringing all

by the light uprisen down

to rest in the resting land

– a world, instead, where all

that dies would fly upward

and outward, nameless and alone.

How sterile then would be

the earth, seasonless the year.

. . .

The year is the showing forth

of the heavenly love that is

the being of the present world.

The leaves, opening and at last

falling, hold a while

the beauty of God who made them

by the work and care of Nature,

His vicar and our mother.

His only is the light

of which all things are made,

the beauty that they are,

the delight that is our prayer.