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.

And so the seasons turn, leaving the parting season holding out the sure and certain promise of the one to come. And if we are sufficiently naïve to refuse to relinquish the season that is passing, we will completely forfeit the promise of the one for which the passing season existed.

There is always some sort of call rolling in from distant horizons, heralding something afoot. And these calls are not the things of culture or podiums or platforms, for the calls of distant horizons are far too grand to be held captive to such menial things. Rather, they are the calls of God and life and things majestic beyond imagination.

It is not summer surrendering. Rather it is summer coming to the grand culmination that it has spent months vigorously preparing for. For fall is the glory of summer in splendid display. Such are the celebrations that God creates, for the intense majesty of His irrepressible character can create nothing less.

Beginnings and endings are simply part of a journey that isn’t stopped by either.

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 when an end descends that we either find immense joy in its departure, or we are weighed heavy with grief over the passing of it. But the unrelenting beauty of life is that every new beginning is ingeniously crafted to meet us in either place and flawlessly move us forward from both.

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.

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?