I was gifted with a couple pieces of Plum by some friends of ours whom we visited yesterday for a ceremony honoring the Fall. Plum is a heavier wood, and it’s difficult to carve, even when it’s green. What they gave me seems a bit dry, so it’ll probably end up feeding the band saw instead of a hook knife and hatchet.

Their property is pretty heavily wooded, and by now most of the trees have gotten down to the business of shedding their leaves, so the ground was littered with tatters of red and brown.

So much of this season and the work it involves centers around the release of things which no longer continue to serve us; the allowing of them to drop like dead leaves amid the lengthening shadows of November.

A teacher of mine with whom I’ve worked for the last several years has encouraged me to study the trees during the Fall; to sit and meditate on how easily most will release their burdens to open space for the new growth of the coming Spring. And yet there is that occasional defiant Oak, roots driven stubbornly into the soil, that clings to the skeletal remains of a few dead leaves even as its branches rattle against the frozen tirade of January’s winds.

I wonder how often we have found ourselves hanging onto our old ways with that same Oak-like tenacity, all the while cursing our seeming inability to release them…

But there is also another teaching wrapped inside the fabric of this meditation. Just before they drop their robes and stand shivering and naked before the icy truth of Winter, the trees breathe in every available photon of light and hold it deeply as if to remind themselves that the coming darkness is not a permanent thing; that the light remains even in presence of so much apparent death and decay.

It’s important to remember this; to find those places within ourselves where the light has gathered; and to know that it still remains, even though all apparent evidence of it has crumbled and fallen away in the long, cold, necessary dark of Winter…