Sonoma West Times & News > Opinion
Published: Wednesday, January 13, 2010 2:01 PM PST
A tribute to fallen leaves

by Shepherd Bliss

As late Autumn matures into early Winter here in the Redwood Empire, some leaves leave their dignified, upright positions and glide harmlessly to the ground. I watch them spiral down. Valley and Black Oaks on the land where I live will soon be stripped naked — mere skeletons without protective, warm clothing. This allows the sun’s rays to reach the ground and visually expose the lush waterway at the bottom of my small, organic farm.

I look and listen quietly to the music the leaves sometimes make as they 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 out during Spring and Summer, as you feed my dreams during your decline. You generate our futures. I appreciate your delicacy.

Trees and leaves are wedded in a deep connection; one cannot survive without the other regenerating them, though their forms change. Humans could not survive without life-giving trees that offer fruit, beauty, moisture, 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 to drive the machines that we use to control, manipulate, and dominate nature.

Leaves transform the sun’s energy, breaking CO2 into carbon and 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 and bring it to the ground. They provide cover for seeds, protecting them and enabling them to grow into the trees and other plants that sustain us. Though small, leaves are an essential part of the food chain in many ways.

We continue to cut down rainforests in the Amazon and elsewhere — described by some as “the Earth’s lungs”— 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. In addition to all the good work they do for humans and the rest of creation, they are wondrous, mystical, and beautiful. A pile of leaves can be quite beautiful and compelling to children and other creatures, if the adults would just let them be.

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, especially at this time of year. Leaves can be moved by brooms and rakes, gently, from an undesired place into compost piles into which they will joyously release their helpful contributions.

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.

Perhaps partly what bothers the man with the hand-held, loud weapon is the death that the leaves expose. As the leaves decay, perhaps they remind him of his own pending demise. Perhaps this helps explain some of his hostility toward leaves and his unprovoked attacks.

On my small farm I gather leaves each year and respectfully retire 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. Leaves do many helpful things for humans and the Earth. The least we could do for them is let them rest in peace on the ground to which they gravitated and thus continue their contributions to the whole. Breaking such natural cycles of our ecosystem is not wise and produces unintended consequences.

I have an invitation. Bring your tired leaves 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. To paraphrase the Statue of Liberty, “Give me your tired, poor, and huddled masses (of leaves),” and I will give them sanctuary.

- Shepherd Bliss is a former Army officer and member of the Veterans Writing Group. He can be reached at: [email protected].

Copyright © 2010 - Sonoma West