A Single Leaf – On autumn, the fall of Empire, and the ancient intelligence of endings

We are entering a threshold season: one of endings, descent, darkness, ancestors, and remembrance.

This weekend marks Samhain and the astronomical cross-quarter day (midpoint between autumn equinox and solstice) arrives November 7. I love these reminders that we’re not merely passing through time, but we are participants in vast, living cycles. Birth, death, decay, regeneration.

The Great Turning.

These cycles aren’t only ecological or cosmic. They speak to the stories and systems we live inside. For example, while Empire demands endless summer, eternal harvest, another century of extraction, a single leaf announces the colossal powers of decay.

The Overculture’s conceit of endless growth and accumulation without relinquishment, is profoundly at odds with the rhythms of the living world. It’s quite the absurd manifesto to carry in a world that knows so intimately how to die, to return, and to share. Ironically, for a system that deals out so much death to subsidize it’s greed, Empire harbors a peculiar theology of immortality: the belief that it has, nor should have, no limits.

Everything has its season. Everything encounters limits.

Even Empires.

As things fall apart, as our inherited structures increasingly show their cracks, I find no small amount of comfort in remembering that their stories, too, are held within larger living cycles.

Endings aren’t failures. In the living world, they make room for the next season and other forms of life to flourish. Yet on the cultural level, endings don’t guarantee renewal.

What we let fall matters. What we do with what falls matters. What we compost matters.

And what new life we nurture in the ruins matters.

An entire cosmos opens through a single leaf.

An “ordinary” maple leaf becomes both an altar to the moment, and an emissary of deep time. If this seasonal threshold invites an opportunity to intentionally connect with ancestors, a forest’s autumn release offers different encounter with ancestral intelligence—written into the ancient grammar of life and death.

What if everything can be a portal into deeper intimacy with the animate web of life?

A leaf, a mushroom, a dew drop, a wren’s whistle, a gathering cloud. Each an invitation to enter more deeply into the great living cycles of which we are already a part.

A poem for this season of thresholds, and for the countless beings teaching us how to live and die and live again.

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A Single Leaf

A single leaf
inaugurates the colossal powers of decay

falling right through the bottom
of summer, wide as life
deep as death

Sink your ear into its runaway veins—
that old hungry bell is booming
and pulling its great green garments up

Can you hear it echoing off the walls
of our luscious huts?

How it pulls the world
with unthwartable desire
into the momentous night?

How it circles the seasons around it
with well-shaped gravity?

It signals that great circle time
is on the hunt
in the shape of a cottonwood leaf

the color of life and death
singing its ephemeral and forever song

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“A Single Leaf” appears the my poetry collection Within the Cave Something Pulses. This winter, beginning December 6, I’m inviting a small circle into a seasonal apprenticeship of the same name, exploring fruitful darkness, shadow, dreams, inner composting, and the wisdom of slowing down. An invitation to deeply enter the season rather than rush past it.