Yellow Leaves

Dressed in flaming scarlet-red attire, Tango, as I named the Ford Fiesta rental, waited impatient on Earthquake Park's parking lot. As usual, like summer, fall, winter, or spring, I wait for no one. My wheeled companion roared ready to explore the Arctic Tundra. I asked Alberta, the name I chose for the vehicle's GPS, to guide me to the coastal Seward Highway, Alaska US 1 South. As Alberta plotted the route, I pondered about yellow leaves and their journey to the ground.

The great Latin American poet, Pablo Neruda, once asked the poignant question in one of his poems: "What happens to yellow leaves that suicide?" I recall I was nine when I first read this line. And I thought, what a macho way of looking at the world. Hombres!

The shower of yellow leaves at Earthquake Park spoke of pleasant surrender. Each falling leaf points at the ever-transforming journey of the universe, the cyclical nature of life. It welcomes the winter, the season of introspection, the wise one that invites us to travel within and find our strength in the messy and often peat-reeking inner mudflats. It somehow embraces the Buddhist principle of detachment fully aware that the greater whole is designed in perpetuity.

There is no need to attach to the impermanence of a specific season when permanence, the soul, is a much larger bowl that contains the whole. One must learn to enjoy that impermanence while celebrating the whole. The same principle applies when we attach to our youth, its temporal nature, and fear the full surrender to the moment in which life occurs.

Such attachment to our past, to look a certain way, to erase our wrinkles and stretch our skins, robs us from the only time in which lives thrives, the moment. Attachment generates much suffering. The idea of linear time is an illusion. Life is what happens while we breathe. I had to come to Anchorage to ask myself these fundamental questions and falling leaves provided a whimsical answer. "Nature knows best," they whispered in complete surrender.

A fallen leaf feeds the roots, and it becomes part of the tree. In this cycle of everlasting transition, nothing is created nor destroyed, nothing is wasted, everything transforms. And I the great transformer, walk my walk in the Great Alaskan Outdoors fully aware that I am a point in the vastness of the universe. A point, nevertheless, that merited both the universe's attention and intention. And as that throbbing point of life, I celebrate my journey, and the journey of all that is. For I am One in perpetuity with yellow leaves and the cycle of endless transformations.