It is autumn on tip-toe that silently walks the hills and treads the forested expanses, gracing in each step a billion leaves in a chorus of colors so brilliantly ingenious that a thousand museums or more could not hold the artistry because a thousand artists or more will never possess the talent to produce what autumn effortlessly creates.

Without as much as a single question, legions of geese lift themselves to autumn’s skies, obediently heeding the distant call of southern horizons. And I think that it’s less the magnificence of their trek, and more about the humility of their obedience to the trek. For if I was left with a single prayer to utter, it would be to be more like them.

Looking up, I observed one solitary leaf that remained on a spindly branch of an old oak tree. And as winter’s frigid winds blew against it twisting it this way and that, I thought that it was either committed to holding on as long as it could or it was afraid to let go.

Today I felt the first brush of autumn as in these waning days of summer it gently leaned over an expectant horizon. And it is in having lived summer to the fullest that autumn is positioned to fill me to the fullest. And I think that if we would engage all of the differing seasons of our lives in a manner such as this, the appreciation of ‘what was’ would be magnified a hundredfold by the anticipation of ‘what is yet to be.

It is the geese plying the graying skies of autumn in floating V-formations on a rendezvous with southern horizons that gives me the greatest pause. For my life is rarely raised to the calls of life on the wing that beg me to rise up and lay hold of distant horizons in search of a season being birthed out of the one now dying. For to stay here in a season now expired is to die along with it, and despite the fact that I had died many times, I must never forget that I can still fly.

If life is nothing more than a journey to death, autumn makes sense but spring does not.

Autumn calls the forest to rest, to exhale in a flood of colors rubbed to a fiery warmth on the hearth of both hill and plain before nodding off to a winter’s slumber. And what better way to turn the page of a season than to celebrate it in a manner such as this?