I am walking on the Garner Creek Trail in the Sangre de Christo mountains in search of autumnal rapture. It works; I slip through the portal in more than a few moments, the beauty pulling me into non-linear time. It also helps that after about a half a mile I no longer have cell service and so can’t incessantly check my phone. The leaves speak louder that way. And it helps that the deeper I go into the forest the further I get from any other humans. It’s just me and a gurgling creek and a fresh fall canyon full of aromatic young pine and giantess aged aspens.
The world is pure yellow, radiant, and softened by pink-orange - speckling, and then littering, the forest floor in mind-altering calico. And the fresh leaves falling from the sky! It rains sparkling paper, giving skin to the wind. When the volume of the rustling suddenly picks up I know that more tissue made of light will twinkle down. I like it when I can see the air that way, while also feeling it around me. Space starts moving and I know nothing is empty. I know that breath moves on its own, and I can relax.
Fall is so unabashedly gorgeous. She’s letting it all go, nothing to create or protect anymore, and everything to reveal. It’s a spectacular and precious turn towards death - a thinning, a drying, a conserving. You can see through everything a bit more, and the beauty shines even brighter because expiration is imbedded inside of it. It can’t be taken for granted like hopeful spring or endless summer. The thick and tall aspens are shedding around me and I suddenly recognize my own shedding. My current forest floor is also littered, with auburn hairs, grey hairs, bleached hairs, brown hairs, silver hairs. My leaves are also falling out, my body is also thinning and drying, and my gorgeousness is also especially potent in this season of my life. Inside and out there’s an explosion of confetti in celebration of the vibrant life-force that’s left before winter. It’s an extended going away party of sorts, and nothing is held back. Why hold anything back?
If I’ve ever waited in the past for a fruition in the future, now is the time to peak. Just a few months ago, in July, I was moving barefoot on the soft grass in my backyard with my eyes closed. In my reverie I was jolted with a sudden absurdist glee realizing I had JUST passed the midpoint of my life! I was there - I was aware of the exact electric second that I lived the halfway moment between my birth and my death. How hilarious! And just like that, so simple, I was now over the apex and in the second half of my allotted time, with a new identity. “I’m middle aged.” I calculated that, if my midpoint was at my current age of 42 then I will die when I am 84. “I have as much time ahead of me as I’ve had thus far?? That’s an immense amount of time!” And “the end is closer than the beginning” - which changes everything.
As I walk deeper into the glowing color of Garner Canyon I muse, at first, that I am also in the autumn of my life. But then I realize that no, I am actually living inside my favorite season of all! I am transiting the ever-so-short-lived “Indian Summer”, for lack of a better name. Second Summer. The time of the Chinese Earth Element. The time surrounding the autumnal equinox when the shadows are longer and waver in a delicate way. When the daylight air is still warm and radiating, though it holds less moisture and hints at the chill just behind it. When some nights are still warm enough for a light jacket, and one can still hike through an old aspen forest during the day in a tank top. It’s the season when there’s a ruddiness and a bittersweetness, both. It’s a time of slowing down after the extreme yang of summer, and harvesting the abundance from earlier efforts. It’s the perfect time to share one’s bounty.
The leaves are waving at me. And they even descend to get closer, landing intimately in my lap. They form something like a red carpet, except yellow, and leading only deeper into winter/oblivion. They make the path softer, and easier to walk on. They touch everything around me, and they touch me. They tell me this is also my season to give everything to the ground.
