A fire is roaring in my wood stove to quell the autumn chill. Green is succumbing to brown. Bareness is replacing luxuriance.  Dawns and dusks are growing silent; they no longer chime with the songs of birds, or buzz with the stirrings of insects, or rustle with the traffic of critters. Yet all this evidence of hunkering down for the long winter ahead is balanced by the surprising persistence of new sproutings.

Today I clipped the bright pungent shoots from the garlic; they will offer springtime freshness to autumn salads and soups. Meanwhile the bare spots in the winter gardens in the cold frames are filling in with hardy greens and beets and herbs. Inside, I’m nurturing populations of baby bacteria where they are turning cabbage into sauerkraut and cucumbers into pickles. Outside, the turkeys, ducks, and geese dash to reap the morning’s offerings from the raspberry bushes at the edge of the yard. And this week the chicks that hatched in April began laying tiny multicolored eggs. Mushrooms are springing up in proportion to the surrounding weeds dying back.

Autumn births and germinations balance springtime deaths and breakdowns. The rich mosaic of Earth occurrences is not respected by replacing linear timelines with cyclical progressions. Even cycles overlap and intersect and merge.          

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