When Death Isn't the End

It’s everywhere.

The falling, the leaving. The drying up and withering away.

The prairies turning brown and the cold nights and the changing of the sun making leaves shiver and yellow and soon, yes, the dying.

There’s spider webs strung with pearls in the grass.

There’s foggy mornings now, they say it means an early winter.

And there’s bemoaning the losing of things. The loss. The dying. The change.

The harvest comes in, in itself a sort of dying, the end of one long glorious way of life. The boxes of Colorado peaches end up on kitchen counters and outside the apples will soon be rosy and ripe.

Some say all things die in autumn, and that is why they despise it. But it is not so.

The leaves on the trees fall because they have come from the earth. And when they have become their truest color, the color they were in the end meant to become, they let go and it is like a homecoming, welcomed again into the good earth from which they came. They will rise again anew, unfurl their glory to the air in the trees and the sky.

The flowers fade and fall and go home, let themselves be taken back into the soil, the wind and the rain.

Things never really die. They simply live, become their truest color, and then go home again. Like you, and me. One day we’ll return to the earth, but it is not the end.

It’ll be a going home, too. To the story that will never end.