I think autumn might be my favorite holiday.
Not Christmas.
Not Halloween.
Not New Year’s.
Autumn.
The season when the trees stop pretending.
There is something deeply honest about watching the leaves fall.
The trees don’t apologize.
They don’t panic.
They don’t try to hold on forever because someone might think they are failing.
They simply become beautiful, and then they let go.
One leaf.
Then another.
Then thousands.
The whole forest participates.
And nobody calls it a tragedy.
The Most Honest Holiday
We spend an enormous amount of our lives trying to preserve things.
Our youth.
Our relationships.
Our accomplishments.
Our identities.
Our good days.
Our stories about who we are supposed to be.
We decorate ourselves with things that say:
Look. I am still here.
And then autumn arrives.
The trees say:
Yes.
And?
Look at us.
We are still here.
And we are letting go.
There is no contradiction.
That is what I love about it.
Autumn doesn’t pretend that loss isn’t loss.
It simply refuses to believe that loss makes something meaningless.
The leaf was beautiful while it was on the tree.
It is beautiful as it changes.
And eventually it falls.
That was always part of the leaf.
The Holiday of Impermanence
There is something beautiful about celebrating a thing you cannot keep.
You don’t go outside to stop the leaves from falling.
You go to watch them fall.
You look upward.
You walk beneath them.
You sit somewhere quiet.
You notice the colors.
You let the moment happen.
And eventually the color disappears.
The holiday ends.
Nobody failed.
That’s the part I love.
The celebration was never about keeping the leaves.
It was about being there while they were here.
A Spell for Letting Go
If I were writing this into my spellbook, I think the spell would be very simple:
Let the beautiful thing finish being beautiful.
That’s harder than it sounds.
We often think love means holding something tightly enough that it cannot leave.
But perhaps sometimes love means being present enough to witness its changing.
A child grows.
A friendship changes.
A home becomes a memory.
A season passes.
A version of yourself disappears.
And the mage watches.
Not because the mage doesn’t care.
Because the mage cares enough to be there for the whole thing.
The beginning.
The middle.
The ending.
The falling.
The Trees Don’t Call It Failure
Imagine if trees had human minds.
Imagine the maple leaf saying:
“I used to be green. Something has gone terribly wrong.”
“I’m changing color. I must be broken.”
“Everyone else is falling. I need to try harder to stay attached.”
We would recognize the absurdity immediately.
The tree isn’t failing.
The tree is being a tree.
The leaf is not dying because it failed to remain young.
It is completing its season.
And perhaps we are like that too.
There are versions of us that were exactly right for one season of our lives.
Then they change.
And sometimes we mistake that change for failure.
We say:
“I’m not who I used to be.”
As though that were an accusation.
Autumn says:
Of course you’re not.
Look at the trees.
My Favorite Holiday
So yes.
Autumn is my favorite holiday.
It is the holiday where nothing is promised to last.
The decorations are alive.
The decorations are dying.
The celebration is the changing itself.
And perhaps that is why it feels so honest.
Spring can promise.
Summer can indulge.
Winter can endure.
But autumn tells the truth.
Everything changes.
Everything passes.
And it can still be beautiful.
So I want to sit beneath the trees.
I want to watch the leaves fall.
I want to let something beautiful end without demanding that it become ugly simply because it ended.
And when the last leaf falls, I don’t want to ask:
“How do I make it stay?”
I want to ask:
“Wasn’t it beautiful?”
And then keep walking.
The forest already knows the way.
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