"One day the Goddess sang...
I have been listening to the hymns of creating, enchanted by the verses. Yet still I am curious.... What is this mysterious awareness shimmering everywhere within it?

"I have been listening to love songs of Form longing for formless...

"What is this power we call Life?.. How may I know this mystery and enter it more deeply?" excerpts from Banter Verses translated by L Roche

The leaves have flown free from their branches now. One or two do remain, dangling gently on the ancient Maples outside the window at work. These magnificent beings have kept me company throughout the season of release, demonstrating, with great pinache, the way to Let Go. I have wanted to honor the wisdom from the trees, and now, only now begin to find words that may reflect the Light shared. Witnessing the process of release this Fall has been quite breath-taking.

These times have offered lots of opportunities to practice releasing, as well as staying in the here and now. The trees continually teach me on this path, as they demonstrating in unparalleled ways how to revel in the glorious moment of now ~ offering me and us all physical reminders to stop, notice, breath deeply ~

With their help, I breathe in the ineffable beauty and mystery, of the ungraspable Now.

To aid that process, I look up often, to purposefully witness the dance of light, color and wind. Their show stopping beauty catches my breath and in that moment of recognition, All Story lines end; All colors merge into one. Time stops

The beauty alone is not what stops the awareness of time in me, or the litany of words that muck about within, in too many nooks and crannies; what really unhooks me, is the visible juxtaposition of life and death in their dance. Their joy in release. What really ceases the tyranny of thought in me, is the taste of the effervescent celebration of life and death held within each breathtaking golden glowing moment of color and motion.

The leaves, dancing in a changing river of glowing light, catch the playful wind, sing their songs out loud in color. In the dance, the invisible shifts within me and my load feels light. Light shifts, the wind ceases, or the moment ends; yet another begins with something new. Each moment sailing into the next with a wake of beauty trailing behind, until eventually it all falls away, breathtakingly.

This celebration, this light show, is a contemplation of joy in constancy and change. Inherent to the process is acceptance of both life and death, in the changing of the colors. Just as there is acceptance in nature in the changing of the day to night. There is acceptance of an end of a season, even as the Earth herself welcomes them all the leaves home. Birches golden fluttering leaf, have turned to Maple reds and orange, and now oaks rusty crimson Sienna. The Earth floor receives them all with open arms.

The very transience of this quintessence is what makes the world stop for me. Makes me pull over on a busy road and step out of my car. Brings breath to my lungs and brings wonder to my eyes.

Meanwhile, the trees will keep playing this eloquence of life with or without audience. The show of beauty and transcience, does not wait for me to wake up. It plays and dances the the joy of the moment, knowing something I forget, that life is precious in everyway, in every expression, in every moment, a gift - celebrate it! Celebrate the changes, the winds, the light. Celebrate now, where life resides; celebrate in this very moment of release and surrender. I arrive home to this remembering in bits and pieces, hoping to arrive fully someday.

I WANT to be the audience. I want to arrive. To stop all distractions and notice what is most important. To stay and say Yes. Yes to Life and love and death and change. To sit in the middle of the fields and embrace it all until the surrender of the leaves themselves, cover me from head to toe.

I want to dance, sing and play in the game, witness the blessed moment as awake as possible. Forgetting all else in the precious presence of now. A now that is so visible and so blessed during "foliage" season. With endless paths to beauty, I choose this.