Fall-ing

A season of letting go to become something new.

Seasonal Contemplations by Vicki Kensinger

[Originally published in the Fall 2025 issue of Mount Gretna Magazine. View the full issue to see this story in its designed layout, complete with additional images.]

Photo by Shannon Fretz Photography.

In the autumn we moved to Mount Gretna, making it our permanent home — at least for this season of our lives — the chestnut oaks were having a mast year. Unfamiliar with the reality of dwelling beneath a dense canopy of trees, we were unprepared for the bombardment of acorns pummeling our metal roof.

That first September evening, lying in bed beneath the steeply sloped roof of our first home here, the report of those nuts, plummeting dozens of feet onto our cottage roof, then tumbling down its incline to drop once again with a knock onto the deck below, startled us awake. Soon enough, we became delighted with the percussive backdrop, a steady beat in the rhythm of our lives here.

Some years, the acorns are prolific. Children delight in gathering them as much as I do in marveling at the interplay of nature.

Walking the paths that weave their way down the hillside to the heart of our village, they roll and crunch beneath our feet, and we know that soon enough the squirrel population will be on the increase. In their interdependent, reciprocal dance — where the squirrels rely upon the nuts to feed themselves and their offspring, and where the trees depend upon the squirrels to bury a few more acorns than they can retrieve and consume — both thrive.

Sure enough, come springtime, oak saplings will be popping forth from flower pots and leaf litter. When the squirrel population grows a bit too great for there to be any leftovers remaining to grow into trees, the trees limit their production until the squirrels’ numbers decrease in response.

In recent years, chestnut oaks have been fall-ing in other ways here in this forest home that we share with them — occasionally atop our tiny dwellings far below. Massive, they land with tremendous impact, sometimes doing unintentional damage. Neighbors, like squirrels, come scurrying out of their homes to survey, support, and wonder. Their falling reminds us of our vulnerability and our shared humanity. They prompt us to remember that we are interconnected, relational, and interdependent beings — human to human, human to earth — in a strange way, then, nurturing us even as they die.

Of course, were these giants to fall in a forest uninhabited by humans and their abodes, their lives would not end with that fall. Over time, their decomposing bodies would offer nurture and shelter for an abundance of life — from fungi to mammals. In their dying, they become a nursery bed.

Often when we think of autumn, of “fall,” we associate it with the more evident “falling” of leaves. We are reminded that when we cease the striving that is the summer season of our lives — for trees, all that chlorophyll production, making things green, producing food and shelter, sequestering carbon, and bequeathing oxygen — the beauty of who we are beneath that busyness is given space to be revealed.

The annual display blatantly reminds us to let go when the time has come to transition into a new season of life, even though our identity is enwrapped in all the greenery, and we may feel as if we’ve just arrived.

Often, I am struck by the idea that just at the point of ripeness, the season is coming to an end. The plant is preparing to die back just as its fruit is ripe. Pumpkins are lying in the field, seed heads are crammed atop browning wildflower stems, acorns are falling from the treetops, and giant chestnut oaks, at the prime of their lives, are lying down. It is a bittersweet moment, at times seemingly arriving all at once, this cusp between prolific fullness and a different sort of beauty that awaits in the season to come.

Although the signs of the season have been hinting, a sudden wind, sometimes harsh, sweeps away what a week ago felt so ripe and vibrant. At other times, this end of a season feels more painful. The chestnut oak suddenly falls; our well-prepared lives suddenly fall apart.

Nonetheless, the coming season patiently awaits, holding out its hand with its subtle offer — or its more insistent demand — of wholeness, inviting us to burrow underground for restoration and rooting, or to move more deeply into the crystalline stillness.

Slowly, the fallen seeds soften, and we decompose our lives to embrace what is a new way of being beautiful, one that offers nurture of another sort. Like the giant chestnut lying on the forest floor, after a life of producing and reproducing, our own fallen lives become a nursery bed, letting go to become something new.

Vicki Kensinger is a lover of the healing power of the written word and the natural world. Her daily journaling practice takes her into the wild terrain of the inner landscape, while her wilderness excursions carry her deep into the backcountry of Ontario via canoe. Mother of five and Gaga to 10, she lives in Mount Gretna with her husband, Don. She blogs at EmmaatLast.wordpress.com and AnAlgonquinAffair.wordpress.com.