A Thing That Falls
Issue 02 | October 2025
Renee Eiler, Lead Writer
Photograph by Vanessa Thomas
My dear reader, you have crossed the threshold. You have ridden the waves of the vibrant summer waters. You have felt the sun kiss your skin with its deep and beautiful rays. You have embarked on new adventures, and you have tasted new flavors. New friends are made and long-lasting ones are deepened. Summer invites us into a season of abundance, full, alive, and colorful. As summer fades, we anticipate a new season beginning.
It is time to slow down. Perhaps your soul can feel it. Perhaps your heart knows it. Each new and radiant morning is slowly showing you the change that is coming. The sun fades sooner at night and it stays hidden longer in the morning. You notice its rays cast more gently in different places through the grass or coming in a different angle through your windows. The changes in light invite you to breathe deeply. Where you are, it may grow colder…not yet the chill of winter, but the clear and definite refreshment of its forerunner. The animals become more abundant, foraging and scouring for what they know they need to find.
Your desire for food changes. Your tastes may shift from the crisp, cold, and quick nourishment of summer that comes with fresh and abundant produce or fireside evenings of a burger and fries to the need for depth. Heat. Fullness. Warm drinks appeal to you more, and the season of soups and broths excites you when even a few weeks ago they didn’t.
And the trees…the trees begin to let their leaves go. They shed their glorious array and surrender it to the earth, giving us a glimpse of some beauty that we know will not last, yet we love and cherish it even so.
The world and the bodies we live in send us a message here–a message of change. Yet not a harsh and sudden one, but steady. We have each experienced change, from the youngest of us to the oldest. For some, it was slow and steady, so much so that we could not even really see it coming until the day that we woke up and we realized how different life must feel now. It could be that change stirs up a sense of hope in you, a sense of excitement or spirit. Yet I know, reader, that it is not always that way. While the seasons change steadily, there are marks in our lives that seem to hold in time, that send us into a momentous and painful lurch; the sudden loss of a family member; an illness in your child; the feeling that something is not right in your womb and the news that a life no longer is; the knowledge of a loved one who did the unexpected; the call you wished had never come regarding your health or your job.
Every human knows. Human hearts are instinctively drawn to change. Even when the grief has overwhelmed us, we pause at the introduction of change or perhaps even after we have crossed that threshold of it and are on the other side and have seen and felt the enlightenment. We have experienced how it has benefited us. We are grateful, at some point in our lives, for the changes that came our way. Yet in order to gain the full and lasting truth of it, surrender is necessary. We have been given a picture in the trees – a picture of surrender within change. A tree does not shed early out of a desire to move quickly or invite the change before it is ready, and it does not shed late in a desperate attempt to grasp and cling to its precious leaves. The leaves are dying, and so it is time to let go. The time is right.
The change of your soul may ache. It may be a story you never expected to be living. Yet the promise of a new beginning remains---the chance to restart, to shed the old, and to let the things that need fall, fall as they must. As we gracefully move away from the beauty of summer, we are brought into a new beauty. Whatever beauty your branches held as you walked through your summer days has now begun to shift. It moves into a new kind of glory, and, while the external moments in your life may feel too fast or like the kind of hard that seems like it doesn't belong, the internal does not have to be so. The inner work of the heart may be embraced. The thing that falls to the ground breaks down and returns to the earth, only to provide a new kind of nourishment and life when the springtime comes. This is the hope we know of. It is a hope that reminds us as we sense the changes coming that there is no need to fear. It is part of the design. It is good, even vital, to the process of our lives. Each tree is not alone in its change. It has its companions around it. As humans, we tend to believe that the changes we are facing are ones that no one else can possibly understand, that our change is unique to our own heart and mind. But like the trees, we have others around us who, if by chance we took the moment to open ourselves up, would surely know what we speak of, too---and not merely with a head knowledge but with soul knowledge.
And so---when you see the sun begin to fade sooner, when you sense the chill creeping upon your skin, when you settle with the change as the trees do and allow the things that need to be shed to fall down to the earth---remember that our hearts, minds, souls, and bodies were made for this. Take slow and simple steps with us this autumn, dear reader, as we lose our leaves, as we shed our colors, and as we enter into the kind of emptiness that gives us a new kind of life.