The Wisdom of a Single Dead Leaf

the fading pulse of life

I picked up this one leaf on the floor as it had freshly fallen from the money tree in my sun room. I thought to myself, this is its final moment, how interesting that it is sharing this with me.

It’s not yet dried up and cracked…it’s dying but not fully dead.

I notice the veins pop out as the sun shines down upon it and it catches my attention.

A single dead leaf presents itself in a final bow of beauty as it transitions from its emerald hue into a descent of royal yellow.

I held the leaf against the backdrop of the morning sunrise and admired its geometric form, symmetry sang out as if to say, all is perfectly designed even in its fall, its descent into goodbye…forever here, forever gone.

I know this leaf will wither and dry up, it will become dirt again, it will “leave” a mark on the imprint of eternity and my exchange with it means it can go feeling seen and admired. Of course, a plant likely doesn’t have that same urge as humans, it grows, it dies, it does what it came here to do with or without admiration, fanfare or acknowledgement, but I can wonder. Nature surrounds us with an open invitation to peer into the window it offers us beyond the modern world and the mundane.

It presents magic, the real kind, the mystery, the unseen, the beauty, in ways that are here to show us we are not in charge in the way we like to think we are…how little we know.

Nature lends itself to us to connect, steward, and learn because it knows we need it more than it needs us. Bestowing us with the messages, meaning, and symbolic insights, nature shows us what we should already know…what has been removed from collective awareness the further we distance ourselves by modern living and group-thinking…inside walls and screens that have us sinking.

The leaf turns gold upon death its showing us that the real gold is in the dying…when there is nothing left…

…dying to our old beliefs

…dying to our old labels

…dying to our comforts

…dying to trying to “figure it all out”

…dying to trying to be something we’re not

…dying to trying to fit in

…dying to the ways of the world

…dying to the exhaustion from trying to impress…. for someone else’s idea of success…well-dressed but lost to ourselves….too focused on being someone else for someone else.

The fluorescent lights kill our calling.
The golden sun re-ignites us, kills our stalling.
The seeds we plant kills our superficial longing.
The blooms we pick kills the need for belonging.

..and this is good.

Can you see what a single leaf can teach? Can you see the roadmap written on its sheath?

That the real gold, the true treasure, is in the death of it all….can you see the serendipity in the single line of a single leaf…can you see the path it weaves…an example of union and division side by side…harmony’s quest painted in the patterns of life…held close to the chest…pressed into the fabric of reality…imprinted, arranged, shaped by the mystery…the Divine waits for us to touch the magic and live more irrationally…in the numinous space where there is transcendence and transformance beyond reason, beyond logic…where the sacred speaks without words…where beauty shines, even upon death…haven’t you heard?

…where we are reminded that the obstacles, struggles, and challenges of this realm are here to forge us into gold…while nature lends a helping hand…and when we descend upon the soil in our final farewell…like a leaf meeting its bon voyage…we, too, leave an imprint…a pattern woven into the infinite by how we showed up, how we lived, how we loved…and the fading pulse of life floats by…we must find the real gold by letting our-selves-die…so that we can really live…in this now moment in time.

When was the last time you watched a leaf free fall…or stopped to admire it laying on the ground…or jumped into a pile…or stopped for a while and simply observed its impact in the wild…and in the now…and in your life and in all of life…this is not nothing…can you see how it’s all worthwhile?

May you find the inner gold and live, really live, a magnificent life!

Let die what needs to die,

With love,

~ Angela

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