I absolutely love the fall and look forward to it every year.  It is a time of year to really lean in to the awe that the season offers as we prepare for more surrender as we approach late fall into winter.  Mother nature wisely models for us to include both awe and surrender as spiritual practices daily.  I heard it said that the way we see and know one thing is the way to wiser seeing and greater true presence in meeting all of our moments. This practice encourages us to meet each moment as it is with true presence and grace.

I happened upon this beautiful poem by Episcopal bishop Stephen Charleston where he describes this sense of knowing, awe, simplicity and the divine that can be found in nature: 

For all the great thoughts I have read
For all the deep books I have studied
None has brought me nearer to Spirit
Than a walk beneath shimmering leaves

Golden red with the fire of autumn
When the air is crisp
And the sun a pale eye, watching.

I am a scholar of the senses
A theologian of the tangible.

Spirit touches me and I touch Spirit
Each time I lift a leaf from my path
A thin flake of fire golden red
Still warm from the breath that made it.

This sense of wonder and awe inspired my morning walk, on this newly chilled crisp fall day.   I offered up much gratitude to God for so many things, firstly the awe filled forest.  I praised Him for the lasts of the brighter colors mostly blanketing the forest floor with some lingering hues of deep orange in the tall oaks with their canvas being the clear blue sky, some yellow still mixing in somewhere in the middle.

  I did notice a big shift in the woods today, the beautiful impermanence of it all, that yes one moment morphs into the next, one season seamlessly flows into another.  Mother nature does not mourn or baulk she just allows what is.  Thanks to folk artist Noah Kahan who hails from Vermont, I now have more descriptive verbiage for this season, stick season or the season of the sticks! This is the title of his latest album.   I know this season so well but having a name makes it feel more formal.  That time when the leaves have fallen but there is no snow yet, that time where things seem a bit bleaker and like not much is happening.  But ahh it is!  The present moment is happening and if we wish away this time longing for the heat of summer or the promise of spring, we deny ourselves the chance to practice surrender.  And yes, mother nature always has her offering of awe if we only have eyes to see, perhaps in the harvest moon,  the crisp breeze across your face, the sun bursting through, or the sounds and smells of the leave on the forest floor or the crack of the sticks under foot.

For me nature is like a microcosm which is like a mere shadow of the macrocosm that it helps us to see.  One of my favorite Bible verses is from Romans:  For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made.  -Romans 1:20.   When I step out into nature even if it’s on my walk into work, I can sense God’s creation all around me and on the days that I remember, within me as well.   

Fr. Richard Rohr reminds us of the importance of awe and surrender in our spiritual lives.    He so eloquently reminds us:  The spiritual journey is a constant interplay between moments of awe followed by a process of surrender to that moment. We must first allow ourselves to be captured by the goodness, truth, or beauty of something beyond and outside ourselves. Then we universalize from that moment to the goodness, truth, and beauty of the rest of reality, until our realization eventually ricochets back to include ourselves! This is the great inner dialogue we call prayer.  Both together are vital, and so we must practice. 

So, practice we must!   And this is such a gift, that spirituality aka life lived with awareness, awe and surrender is called a practice not a perfect.  God even gave us free will to choose Him and to find Him in all of the places and faces that he has created, even in the season of the sticks!