October 2024

Dried basswood leaf with dangling seeds — Basswood Leaf

It is the peak of fall. Not the peak of color, but the peak of sound and the peak of smell.

A few weeks ago the ground was patterned, the leaves of each tree pooled around it in fallen skirts of color: yellow here, orange there, reddish brown over there. Now they mix promiscuously, stirred into an impossible puzzle of divergent shapes. The downed leaves, their colors muted but not gone, rustle as I shuffle through them, a few shattering with each step. The smell of tannins fills the air. There is nothing like it.

The autumnal light slants through the thinning canopy. It has an intense luculence due, I think, to the low humidity, and the touch of color reflected from the turning leaves above. Below, much of the understory is still green, taking advantage of the late fall light.

A gust of wind, and leaves detach and drift downwards: some wobble; some tumble; some spin slowly downwards, anchored by a pendant package of seeds. These are basswood, and their aerodynamics offer them passage deep into the still air of the forest where they can take root in the dappled shade they prefer.

The others touch down near by, though they skip and skitter along until they drift in a depression or a lee or the stream, where the steep into tea.

The creek is beside me, and a leaf taps down on its surface, generating a concentric pattern of rings that stretches into ellipses that vanish into the current. I see other disturbances. Wind ripples and catspaws. Small eddies in the lee of a log. Standing waves from sunken stones. Small whorls of water, created by I know not what, that float with the current until they dissipate a few seconds later. A lot is going on.

Like the leaves on the stream, impressions from the world tap down onto my imagination. Ideas ripple outwards, usually dissipating into nothing. But sometimes though, an idea is like a bit of turbulence, able to maintain itself for a bit. What attracts me with this image is that what happens arises from interactions. It is not the water. Nor the flow of the stream. Nor the leaves a lighting on its surface. It is not the stones on the bottom, nor the response of the flowing water. It is an interaction among all these things, constantly ongoing, constantly propagating, constantly dying out, and yet arising anew every moment.

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