“Autumn is a season of great beauty, but it is also a season of decline: the days grow shorter, the light is suffused, and summer’s abundance decays toward winter’s death. Faced with the inevitable winter, what does nature do in autumn? It scatters the seeds that will bring new growth in the spring -and scatters them with amazing abandon.”
~Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak

The last few weeks I have been aware of the embarrassment of riches of acorns. Outside my office window and all along the walking paths I frequent every day, there are strong, tall, oak trees that are making their way into their winter fashion statement. However, before they can let go their brilliant red-brown leaves, they have work to do. A work that makes a smorgasbord of delight for the hundreds of squirrels that also have their own work to do. Their work is to eat, to get plump,to make ready their bodies for the cold temperatures and lack that will be their winter life. I have marveled at how these two partners in Creation are in this seasonal cahoots.

Acorns are an amazing little seed. Their unique shape is sleek and that sweet hat that sits on what seems its head is a fascinating wonder. Both children and adults alike cannot resist the urge to bend and pick them up and put them in a pocket. The sound they make as they crunch underfoot in unlike any other. Both squirrel and human foot help the acorn do its work…..to spread the hope of new life for yet another go round the sun.

Many people I know dread autumn, hate seeing the summer green turn its kaleidoscope
of unimaginable colors. They hate to see autumn arrive because they know that winter is not far behind. Darkness becomes our companion in winter, and even in these still autumn days, the darkness is already seeping into the ways we shape our comings and goings. We need to be aware that darkness is descending earlier and light is arriving later as we plan whatever outdoor activities that have become our pattern. An after work or after dinner walk can now be completed in near total darkness. If the pattern is to rise early, as is mine, the walk outside is starting later and later each day if light is required.

All this can seem like decline. Decline of light. Of color. Of green. Of life. Unless, of course, we pay attention to the acorn and its parent, the oak tree. This oxygen producer with a trunk and limbs is busy ‘scattering with amazing abandon’ the promise of air and shade and foliage for the year that is still only dream to us. While we may be making plans for what next year or the next ten years may bring, the oak tree is literally giving of itself for a life that is yet to be. As acorns hit the ground, as they fall softly or with a thud, the oak tree is making an investment in our future and their own.

In theological circles, we might call this sacrifice. We might attach all kinds of heady language to what is happening and we would not be wrong to do so. What the oak tree is doing is what our ancestors did for us and what we human ones also do for our children, our grandchildren, the future of the world. We give of ourselves, we plant the seeds, we water them in hope, that new life will grow, a life that has a little bit of us tucked inside what will be born.
This is one of the lessons of the seasons of which we are blessed to be a part. It is not something to dread as much as open ourselves to, be aware of, so we do not miss the blessing of what it means to be a part of this amazing Creation. As the trees let go their leaves, as the earth gives up whatever it has grown, seeds for what is to come are falling, burrowing, resting into what is yet to be. The earth is doing this with abandon.

It gives me reason to pause and wonder how I might do the same. What about you?