In Praise of Fallen Leaves—Let Them Be!

Pre-Publication Draft: Criticisms Solicited, to [email protected]

By Shepherd Bliss (1120 words)

As Autumn matures into Winter here in the Redwood Empire, leaves leave their dignified, upright positions and glide harmlessly to the ground. I watch them spiral down. The valley and black oaks on the land where I live will soon be stripped naked—mere skeletons without their warm clothing. The conifers drop their sharp needles gradually over time. I look and listen as the leaves fall; humans named this season after their important, life-giving descent. The planet’s rich forest floor maintains us all.

Leaves seem to delight in the arrival of their favorite dance partner—the wind that blows in from the Pacific Ocean. Dear leaves, I love you so, in your many forms, shapes, colors, kinds, sizes, and smells. I relish the soft outside bed that you make during this season, onto which I will recline and sleep during Spring and Summer, as you feed my dreams during your decline.

Trees and leaves are connected; you cannot have one without the other. Humans could not survive without life-giving trees that provide fruit, beauty, and oxygen. They help clean up the messes that industrial humans make and the chaotic climate changes that we stimulate by our over-use of fossil fuels.

Leaves transform the sun’s energy into oxygen. Humans need a constant supply of air to survive. Leaves are the ultimate source of life for all plants and animals on the Earth through food-manufacturing, photosynthesis, and transpiration. Leaves bring the breath of life to us. They capture water from the air and bring it to the ground. They provide cover for seeds, protecting them and enabling them to grow into the trees that sustain us.

Yet we continue to cut down the Earth’s lungs in Amazon jungles and elsewhere at alarming rates and blow life-giving leaves into sterile plastic body bags. Leaves warrant more respect and gratitude. Instead, some treat them as a nuisance and abuse them.

Sure, leaves can sometimes get in the way. Leaves are not perfect all the time, or appropriate everywhere. Though I sing their praise, I do not mean to deify them. But many good things do come in small packages.

But wait. What do I see? A neighbor has strapped a heavy machine to his back. What is it that now thunders? He pulls a string and the machine erupts explosively into action. The leaves seem to bother him. So he arms himself for battle and blows them around and around and around. So much firepower against such sweet and giving creatures who seek to bed down together on the comfort of the ground.

Dear leaves, please forgive my fearful neighbor.

Poets have been inspired by and praised leaves for centuries. Walt Whitman worked most of his adult life on his one book of poems—“Leaves of Grass.” There are things that we do not much notice, like the leaves afoot, without which we could not survive.

Robert Frost also wrote about leaves and grass. Contemporary American poet Mary Oliver, in “Songs of Autumn” speculated “…don’t you imagine the leaves think how/ comfortable it will be to touch/ the earth…” Such great American poets would shudder at our 21st century disregard and disrespect of leaves and their essential role in the environment.

Leaves circulate through our lives in various ways and forms, connecting us. They return to the “feet of the trees,” W.S. Merwin writes in his poem “To a Leaf Falling in Winter.” Then they “…enter the big corridors/ of the roots into which they/ pass…” --the tree roots and our human roots, at the base of which is a nourishing bed of leaves, unless we blow them away. They may be “forgotten,” Merwin reports, but we should remember and celebrate their multiple gifts.

Trees are rooted and stationary; leaves are their mobile, other dimension. Sometimes a tree rains its leaves to the ground. Other times they fall one at a time, joining their family of leaves. Grounded leaves absorb and witness.

Where would we be without leaves and their natural cycle of birth to death, which for some happens during the seasons of a single year? Aha. Perhaps that is the rub and partly what bothers the man with the hand-held, loud weapon. As the leaves decay, perhaps they remind him of his own pending demise. Perhaps this helps explains some of his hostility toward leaves and his unprovoked attacks. “Out, out damn leaf,” to paraphrase Lady Macbeth. But, alas, the blown away leaf often returns, brought back by its dance partner—the natural wind.

This is what British poet Gerald Manley Hopkins seems to have had in mind with his famous poem “Spring and Fall: To A Young Child.” He writes about “…grieving /over Goldengrove unleaving.” But it was really Margaret that was being mourned.

On my small farm I gather leaves each year and put them in a final resting place on the berms of my boysenberry plants as mulch, which breaks down into compost, makes topsoil and feeds the berries. Oh, lovely leaf-fed berries.

As I look at piles of leaves, they sometimes seem like clouds. I see other creatures within them, perhaps those who came before them and made them or will come after them and be made of them. We are all connected.

Sometimes I even light up leaf piles, further transforming them. They snap, crackle, and pop, as if talking to me. I respond. On my Uncle Dale’s Iowa farm in the late l940s we would collect wood ashes from the fireplace and stove and spread them on our fields. Ashes are like fallen leaves. Ashes are alkaline, a good balance to the un-composted redwood needles, which are acidic. Everything that lives eventually falls apart and breaks down, even people.

Sometimes I visit Robert Frost’s New England in the Fall, where I first learned about color. As they changed, I saw how I could also change. Leaves were my teacher; they have much to teach about nature and ourselves. The foliage visibly evolves in New England. How beautiful the sugar maples are with their autumnal shine.

Do we really need to work so hard to control and dominate leaves? Must we spread the human war-making tendency to this gentle, defenseless creature?

I have an invitation. Bring your tired leaves, or green ones, to my farm. We will provide them an honorable place to rest in peace. We welcome them with open arms, knowing that they will devolve from mulch, to compost to topsoil. I enjoy watching birds and squirrels scamper about playfully in leaves.

A life without visible fallen leaves afoot, especially in the fall, is missing something important. A leafless town is a lifeless town. Fallen leaves remind us of the natural birth/grown/death cycle.

Leaf blowers are a weapon of mass destruction that do substantial collateral damage—to humans, bees, insects, plants, and the ground itself. We should do something about them.