Undiscovered gifts

Autumn is my favorite time of year. It has this bittersweet quality for me as the season shifts from growing to dying - a time to harvest the abundance the land produces. Rituals and routines footnote the season: the crack of helmets at my sons football practice, the frenetic activity of my wife and kids stocking up on school supplies. Witnessing this activity brings back memories of my mom taking me to JC Penney at the end of every summer to buy my new pair of shoes for school year.

Chuck Taylor Converse Hi Tops. I can still smell the pungent odor of the fresh rubber as I pulled them out of the box. As soon as the shoe salesman finished tying the last lace, much to my mom's dismay I would launch myself into the aisles ripping up one and down the other, dodging shoppers, rounders of lingerie and the glaring stare of the department manager. I swear I ran faster and jumped higher in those new pair of shoes.

Of late however, Autumn has come to represent so much more for me. I can see the visible signs of nature preparing for winter on our property. Over the last couple of weeks my wife and I have been watching a squirrel drop fir cones from the top of a fir tree just outside our deck, creating a huge pile of cones at the base of the tree every day. By the next morning they’ve disappeared, foraged away in the night. The bear on our property have equally been preparing for the coming hibernation, clawing the old rotting stumps for the smorgasbord of bugs, and the Canadian geese building their strength and endurance for the coming voyage south, flying back and forth in formation over the Steigerwald Wildlife refuge.

With these observations in mind, I ponder the questions of "How are we preparing for the coming winter? What harvest are we reaping in our selves? Are we picking the fruit and making something wonderful with it, or are we letting it rot on the vine? If the autumn season yielded the greatest gifts, what would we yield? What abundance would we tap that sustains those around us?" The tragedy is most of us go to our graves with our gifts still inside us - the kind of gifts that can transform the world around us.

So it begs the lasting question, what will it take for each of us to do something about it?