Fall is a fallow rotting scent, fallen leaves made wet by heavy rain, the quieting earth loosened to welcome the dregs for a long winter’s nap.
In the city that scent is elusive, the earth wrapped tight in asphalt, cement. What patches remain are woven thick with the stuff of people, wires and cables, manholes dropping to water pipes, to sewage systems, subway tunnels rumbling and shaking the weakened crust. The earth lives deep here, too deep for thrusting a hungry hand into its heady richness, too deep to confront the truth of being but a tiny speck on this great blue marble.
And still the earth lives and dies, grows and expands, nurtures and maintains us even when we think we have tamed her. Mother Earth, she provides the foundations, the rhythms upon which we so depend, and still we take little time to recognize what our lives might be with out her quiet constancy.
But Fall reminds us, with its bittersweet honesty, of the inevitability of life, death and renewal. Nature is in its gloaming, accepting endings, like a period at the end of the sentence of a year. The story goes on. But this tale has been told.
Our lives, too, follow cycles, both long and short. We are young, we grow, develop, change, renew, become someone new with the flavor or hint of our previous selves, but adapted for the changes our lives bring. We are sometimes broken, we die a quiet death only to live again, scarred perhaps, but stronger too. We rise again, ever hopeful, ever seeking, wiser and more prepared, for the next foray into the uncertainty of a new place, a new position, a new role, a new person in our lives.
And, so like the seasons, we are born, we grow, we live, we die, in order that we may live again, again, and again in this one lifetime.
Jessica Ciosek lives in NYC with her husband, two children, two cats, one dog and often wonders after a life lived closer to the earth.