Holding On and Letting Go

I've been wrestling with a perennial dilemma, one that occurs at this time of year, every year. Fall is a time of pervasive restlessness, contrasted with a time of nestling into where I am...of wanting to fly off with the waterfowl on adventures to new places but,at the same time, wanting to pour my energy into the home place, planting new plants in support of next year's birds and pollinators. I am not the first to say, but do agree, that autumn is a bittersweet, melancholy kind of time, a savory, glorious bursting of brief unparalleled beauty preceding the starkness and silence of winter. It is a time of letting go, and I intentionally hold on to the promise that autumn's developing tree buds will be next years leaves and flowers.

This year, I am wrestling more deeply than usual.  We left my much-loved old home in PA and moved to southern MD three and a half years ago and have lived on the farm where I work, for two.  The farm is a beautiful old property, set high on a hill overlooking the Potomac River, a patchwork of fields, woodlands and marshes. Today the woodlands are ablaze with color, and the marshes are filling with ducks and migrating sparrows who will stay through the winter. Today I feel at home here....and thus my deeper wrestling.

It is dangerous to fall in love with a place you do not own and know that some day you will be leaving.  Granted, the argument can be made that it is also dangerous to fall in love with a place you do own, because you have no assurance about how long you will be able to stay. I know that I won't be working and growing old on this lovely old comfortable farm, however, and, even amid the joy and gratitude of living here, I feel the early stirrings of grief for when we will have to leave. All the more so in autumn.


In Pennsylvania I had an acquaintance who knew as much about native plants and ecosystems as anyone I have ever known. He was an electrician and lived in a city apartment, yet started thousands of plants for restoration projects under lights in his living room.  I once asked whether he had a garden and he simply answered, "The world is my garden." I marveled at his detachment from and his investment in so many places to which he had contributed his love for the land.  He has become something of a model for when I feel the attachment to one place too keenly and fear having that attachment broken...but I am not there yet, and secretly doubt  that I ever will be.

The tensions of holding on and letting go characterize love, no matter who or what our hearts embrace and the more deeply we love, the more deeply we grieve when faced with loss.  Autumn is a time for remembering the graces and gifts I have been given through the year, for recognizing the abundance the earth supplies and even for gratitude that, as the trees prepare to sleep, I are blessed with the visual feast all around me, brief though it may be. And so I accept that the beauty of autumn, in my heart anyway, is tinged with the coming sadness for when it will be over, and that I will also find beauty in the bare sculpture of the trees and the crispness of snow as winter approaches. I am reminded that my life is a continual, loving experience of holding on and letting go and that it always will be. And I determine, once again, to try my best to live with gratitude, in the moment.