This collage shows how two trees have changed in the past 7-10 days. The top tree has lost the top half of its leaves. The leaves that remain are paler (from red to pink). The grass is now covered with the faded leaves. In the bottom panels, a house "appears" because the bright gold/ yellow screen has been removed. Even in the earlier picture, there's a carpet of beautiful color.
This is also the season of fitful rain and gusty wind and heavy thick cloud cover. On morning bike rides, there's always the sound of wind shuffling leaves in high branches. This is also the season of "carting off" of leaves -- leaves raked to the gutter. I'm storing mine in my new compost bin.
Things change. That's a truism and cliche. It's also a core tenant of Buddhism. Everything that comes into existence passes out of existence. It's something I learn from Joseph Goldstein. And something I learned from Henry of Henry's Farm, when he writes in consolation of floods that destroy some low fields on his farm.
But one aspect of "things change" that I hadn't thought much about before is that "change" should be said "transforms." Things change and become something different and (often) unexpected.
The framework for this is something like: "I had thought that X was going to become Y, but it actually became X+Y or X/Y or Y*X or 2X-Y.
I had expected the leaves to fall off the trees, but I hadn't expected the beautiful bright leaf carpet or the starkly revealed house architecture exposed.
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I'm reading Henry David Thoreau: A Life by Laura Dassow Walls. I learned that Thoreau boasted that he could predict the day of the year within a day or two by walking through the forest and seeing what flowers were blooming (a testament to his yearly attention and noting of details of the forest year after year.)
I also learned that scientists now are using his records to study climate change because flowers are blooming earlier and later now than in the mid 19th century.
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Here's another tree from Season #29. Big and empty.
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