My favorite season is spring—until fall arrives, and then my favorite season is fall: the seasons of change, the seasons that tell me to wake up, to remember that every passing moment of every careening day is always the last moment, always the very last time, always the only instant I will ever take that precise breath or watch that exact cloud scud across that particular blue of the sky.

How foolish it is for a mortal being to need such reminders, but oh how much easier it is to pay attention when the world beckons, when the world holds out its cupped hands and says, “Lean close. Look at this!” This leaf will never again be exactly this shade of crimson. The nestlings in the euonymus just beyond the window will never again be this bald or this blind. Nothing gold can stay. —Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations

Nestling myself
into the pine and moss
base of your trunk
I raise my Nalgene that runneth over 
To you, Mother of the forest.
Today, I whisper
Let’s celebrate another ring! 
And my birthday wish-
Released into the wooded wonder
Like a seed pod
Floating through
The cool air 
With hope and gratitude,
With a promise
to return.

River Light (Late Migrations by Margaret Renkel)

I try to imagine what it must have been like for the first human beings who moved through this dark forest: to glimpse a flare of light on moving water, to step out of the shadows of the close trees and see the sun flashing on a broad river. To see air and water and light conjoined in a magnificent blaze. That first instant must have felt the way waking into darkness feels—not knowing at first if your eyes are open or closed.

In that instant, the river is not a life-giving source of water and fish and passage. In that instant, it is not the roiling fury that can swallow whole any land-walking, air-breathing creature. It is only itself, unlike any other thing. It was here long before we were here, and it will be here after we are gone. It will erase all trace of us—without malice, without even recognition. And when we are gone to ground and all our structures have crumbled back to dust, the river will become again just the place where light and water and sky find each other among the trees.

A tractor is humming with solemn duty — one of the goats must be buried before nightfall, before the coyotes descend. As I watched the farmhand carefully haul the goat from the adjacent field, the flock of sheep, a whole menagerie of beings, seemed to gather as a minyan in focused attention as their companion departed.

The farm is peaceful in early light, afternoon rain, and evening sleepiness. This place is a labor of love. But there is a ragged toughness too—rough hands and leathered skin, toiling and turning the soil with tools. There is loss and birth, winters of grey and biting salty wind, then the bursting of color with spring and the summer days with endless light.

Just before the tractor began its morbid movement, my son was nestling his face in fresh cut flowers, smelling each one and commenting on the different scents. Yes, I thought. As the saying goes (as cliched as it is) remember to smell the flowers, amidst this fleeting life. Don’t just admire them from afar—investigate and delight, protect and bless!

Lord of the springtime, Father of flower, field and fruit, smile on us in these earnest days when the work is heavy and the toil wearisome; lift up our hearts, O God, to the things worthwhile—sunshine and night, the dripping rain, the song of the birds, books and music, and the voices of our friends. Lift up our hearts to these this night and grant us Thy peace. Amen.—W.E.B Du Bois

For those moments we know our name is only Your name—Ein Sof—infinite as the desert’s dust and the sea’s sand. W.S Merwin says it all in this poem, Far Along in the Story:

The boy walked on with a flock of cranes

following him calling as they came

from the horizon behind him

sometimes he thought he could recognize

a voice in all that calling but he

could not hear what they were calling

and when he looked back he could not tell

one of them from another in their

rising and falling but he went on

trying to remember something in

their calls until he stumbled and came

to himself with the day before him

wide open and the stones of the path

lying still and each tree in its own leaves

the cranes were gone from the sky and at

that moment he remembered who he was

only he had forgotten his name