✨Before the leaves come down

What this season is quietly moving toward...

The light is leaving earlier now.

You feel it before you can name it. The pull toward inward, toward quiet, toward the early lamp.

And the trees — right now the trees are on their way to peak glory, out here in the Pacific NW.

I sometimes think fall is the most honest season. It shows us, right out in the open, that letting go can be the most beautiful thing a tree ever does. This color just beginning to catch? It comes because the leaves are already starting to release. The beauty and the letting go are the same thing. 

We just get to stand in the fullness of it for a little while first.

But I always feel what's coming, even now.

Soon these branches will be bare. And here's the part that stops me every year: once the leaves are down, you can suddenly see the sky through the tree.

The branches were always reaching up into all that space. You just couldn't see it, because the everyday fullness was in the way.

Grief works something like this.

We know the people we love through the ordinary. The voice, the hands, the way they filled a room. That fullness is a gift, as are the leaves.

Right now, if you're missing someone, you may be in the blaze of it — the ache and the love at their most vivid. That's breathtaking too, in its own hard way.

And something else is coming. The tree doesn't lose itself when the leaves fall. It draws down into its roots and stays entirely there through every bare month. What changes is what you can see. A different kind of seeing becomes possible once the ordinary fullness isn't in the way.

This is the season that opens that door. Something in the quieting thins the distraction, which is why so many people tell me they feel their people more in autumn, not less.

And I'll name this gently, because it's true. Fall is the front edge of the holidays. The first empty chair is still weeks away, and some part of you may already be bracing.

You're allowed to feel both. The vivid ache of right now, and the quiet closeness the season is moving toward. That's not a problem to solve. That's what love looks like as the leaves begin to turn.

So, a small practice for this week.

Find a tree in its full color. Let yourself take it in while it lasts. And then let yourself wonder, without any pressure to be sure: when these branches go bare, what might become visible to me that the fullness has been hiding?

Write down whatever comes. Even one word.

In peace,
Johanna

 P.S. If someone came to mind while you were reading this, trust that. That's not nothing. That's them, already reaching toward you through the branches.