In Praise of Fallen Leaves
by Shepherd Bliss
by Shepherd Bliss
As Autumn matures into Winter here in the Redwood Empire, some leaves leave their dignified, upright positions and glide harmlessly to the ground. I watch them spiral down. Valley and black oaks on the land where I live will soon be stripped naked—mere skeletons without their protective, warm clothing. Conifers drop their sharp needles gradually over time. I look and listen as the leaves fall; humans named this season after their important, life-giving descent. The planet’s rich forest floor maintains us all.Leaves seem to delight in the arrival of their favorite dance partner—the wind that blows in from the Pacific Ocean and takes multiple partners for a spin on the forest dance floor. Dear leaves, I love you so, in your many forms, shapes, colors, kinds, sizes, and smells. I relish the soft outside bed that you make during this season, onto which I will recline and sleep out during Spring and Summer, as you feed my dreams during your decline. You generate our futures. I appreciate your delicacy.
Leaves transform the sun’s energy into oxygen. Humans need a constant supply of air to survive. Leaves are the ultimate source of life for all plants and animals on the Earth through food-manufacturing, photosynthesis, and transpiration. Leaves bring the breath of life to us. They capture water and bring it to the ground. They provide cover for seeds, protecting them and enabling them to grow into the trees that sustain us. Though small, leaves are an essential part of the food chain in many ways, which I realize when a see a blue jay grab a worm from a pile of leaves on my farm.
Yet we continue to cut down the Earth’s lungs in Amazon jungles and elsewhere at alarming rates and blow life-giving leaves into sterile plastic body bags. Leaves warrant more respect and gratitude. Instead, some treat them as a nuisance and abuse them. In addition to all the good work they do for humans and the rest of creation, they are wondrous, mystical, and beautiful.
Sure, leaves can sometimes get in the way. Leaves are not perfect all the time, or appropriate everywhere. Though I sing their praise, I do not mean to deify them. But many good things do come in small packages. Leaves can gently be moved from an undesired place.
My gardener friend Jay Pedersen, who works at Sonoma State University, where I teach, has written a “Blowers Away Recipe” for a
“Peaceful and Healthy Garden Culture (Serves many).” He notes that the ingredients include “gloves, rakes, brooms, scoop shovels, tarps, pitch forks.” Studies reveal that these simple tools can be even faster than the industrial alternative.
But wait. What do I see? Someone has strapped a heavy, vibrating machine to his back. What is it that now thunders? He pulls a string and the machine erupts explosively into action. The leaves seem to bother him. So he arms himself for battle and blows them around and around and around. So much firepower against such sweet and giving creatures that seek to bed down together on the comfort of the ground. The wind returns to play with its partners. The man shoots at them again. To what end?
Dear leaves, please forgive the fearful leaf blower warrior.
A life without visible fallen leaves afoot, especially in the fall, is missing something important. A leafless town is a lifeless town. Fallen leaves remind us of the natural birth/grown/death cycle.
Poets have been inspired by and praised leaves for centuries. Walt Whitman worked most of his adult life on his one book of poems—“Leaves of Grass.” There are things that we do not much notice, like the leaves afoot, without which we could not survive.
Robert Frost also wrote about leaves and grass. Contemporary American poet Mary Oliver, in “Songs of Autumn,” speculated “…don’t you imagine the leaves think how/ comfortable it will be to touch/ the earth…” Such great American poets would shudder at our 21st century disregard and disrespect of leaves and their essential role in the environment.
Leaves circulate through our lives in various ways and forms, connecting us. They return to the “feet of the trees,” W.S. Merwin writes in his poem “To a Leaf Falling in Winter.” Then they “…enter the big corridors/ of the roots into which they/ pass…” --the tree roots and our human roots, at the base of which is a nourishing bed of leaves, unless we blow them away. They may be “forgotten,” Merwin reports, but we should remember and celebrate their multiple gifts.
Trees are rooted, stationary; leaves are their mobile, other dimension. Sometimes a tree rains its leaves to the ground. Other times they fall one at a time, joining their family of leaves, resting for a while, until returning to duty in some other form. Grounded leaves absorb and witness.
Where would we be without leaves and their natural cycle of birth to death, which for some happens during the seasons of a single year? I do not understand the passion of some to use leaf blowers.
Perhaps partly what bothers the man with the hand-held, loud weapon is the death that the leaves expose. As the leaves decay, perhaps they remind him of his own pending demise. Perhaps this helps explain some of his hostility toward leaves and his unprovoked attacks. “Out, out damn leaves,” to paraphrase Lady Macbeth. But, alas, the blown away leaves often return, brought back by their dance partner—the natural wind. Or perhaps he is unaware of the deeper impacts of the machine?
In British poet Gerard Manley Hopkin famous poem “Spring and Fall: To A Young Child.” He writes about “…grieving /over Goldengrove unleaving.” But it was really Margaret that was being mourned as the leaves fell.
On my small farm I gather leaves each year and respectfully retire them in a final resting place on the berms of my boysenberry plants as mulch, which breaks down into compost, makes topsoil and feeds the berries. Oh, lovely leaf-fed berries. Leaves do many helpful things for humans and the Earth. The least we could do for them is let them rest in peace on the ground to which they gravitated and thus continue their contributions to the whole. Breakng such natural cycles of our ecosystem is not wise and produces unintended consequences.
As I look at piles of leaves, they sometimes seem like clouds. I see other creatures within them, perhaps those who came before them and made them or will come after them and be made of them. We are all connected, according to both mystics and physicists.
I even light up leaf piles, further transforming them. They snap, crackle, and pop, as if having a message for me. I respond. On my Uncle Dale’s Iowa farm in the late l940s we would collect wood ashes from the fireplace and stove and spread them on our fields. Ashes are like fallen leaves—that which remains. Ashes are alkaline, a good balance to the un-composted redwood needles, which are acidic. Everything that lives eventually falls apart and breaks down, even people.
I like to visit Robert Frost’s New England in the Fall, where I first noticed brilliant color. As the leaves change, I see how I can also change. Leaves were my teacher; they have much to teach about nature, ourselves, and transformation. The foliage visibly evolves in New England. How beautiful the sugar maples are with their autumnal shine.
Do we really need to work so hard to control and dominate leaves? Must we spread the human war-making tendency to this gentle, defenseless creature?
I have an invitation. Bring your tired leaves to my farm. We will provide them an honorable place to rest in peace. We welcome them with open arms, knowing that they will devolve from mulch, to compost to topsoil. I enjoy watching birds and squirrels scamper about playfully in leaves.
“Leaf blowers are weapons of mass destruction that do substantial collateral damage—to humans, bees, insects, plants, and the ground itself,” a friend noted. We should do something about them.
“Though I try hard to be conciliatory,” another friend noted, “you have convinced me that I must take sides. With the leaves!”
(Shepherd Bliss, sb3@pon.net, has run the Kokopelli Farm for nearly two decades and currently teaches part-time at Sonoma State University. He has contributed to over two dozen books, most recently to the Sierra Club Books “Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind.”
