When Things Fall Away, You Remain
We started this series back at the beginning of the season with a tree full of leaves and a question about what happens when things start coming loose. Twenty-six posts…
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Fall Is Not the End, It’s the Preparation
Everything a woods needs for next spring is already on the ground right now. The acorns are down. The maple seeds spun off in October. The leaf litter that’s going…
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What Fall Teaches Us About Identity
You can’t tell what shape a tree is in July. The leaves are in the way. Come November the structure’s right there, every fork and angle and the one heavy…
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Strength Looks Different in This Season
We’ve got a picture of strength in this country and it’s all summer imagery. Full canopy, heavy fruit, everything visible and abundant and going. Nobody puts a November tree on…
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When What You Lose Makes Room for Life
Let me get the annoying part out of the way first. When a mature tree comes down in a woods, light hits the forest floor for the first time in…
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You Are Not Failing, You Are Shedding
A woman sat in my office last fall and gave me a list. Marriage in trouble. Quit a job she’d had eleven years. Hadn’t been to church since June. Kids…
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Leaves Fall to Protect the Tree
I learned something a few years back that rearranged how I talk about boundaries, and it came from a forestry page I was reading for no good reason at eleven…
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When Life Looks Bare but Isn’t Empty
Farmers around here will tell you a field in November looks like nothing. Stubble and mud. Drive past it at dusk and you’d swear the whole thing died. Underneath, there’s…
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God Is Present in Seasons of Shedding
There’s a stretch of road out past my house where the trees meet overhead all summer. Green tunnel, all of it. Then, when fall comes, it’s a skeleton. You can…
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Fall Reminds Us That Change Can Be Beautiful
Here is a piece of grade school science that changed how I see the fall coming. Leaves do not turn colors. Not really. The yellows and the oranges were in…
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The Quiet Beauty of Letting Go
I put the garden up every September, and every year there is a strange minute in the middle of it. I stand there with the tomato cages in my arms,…
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Fall Is Not the Beginning of the End
The first cool morning always catches me off guard. You step out for the paper or to start the car. You notice that the air has changed overnight, and you…
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When Things Fall Away: The Sacred Power of the Fall Season
There is a week in western Kentucky, usually somewhere in the middle of September, when you can feel the whole county exhale. The air changes before the calendar does. The…
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You Are More Than What You Survived
A woman sat in my office a while back at the good end of hard work. Years of it. She had stopped bracing when doors shut. This woman could say…
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What Healing Actually Looks Like Over Time
A client of mine, years into good, brave work, hit a hard anniversary and spent a weekend flat on the mat. Old symptoms, old thoughts, the works. She came in…
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Building a Life That Doesn’t Require Survival Mode
Here is a pattern I see all the time, and it breaks my heart a little every time I see it. Somebody does real healing work. Therapy, tools, tears, the…
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Co-Regulation: Healing Happens Around Safe People
Watch a mama with a crying baby and you will see the oldest medicine on earth. She does not explain to the baby that the situation is manageable. She picks…
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How Trauma Survivors Can Strengthen Their Minds and Build Lasting Resilience
This is a guest post from a contributing writer. The words and views here are the author’s own. I read every guest submission before it runs. However, publishing is not…
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Fight Mode: When Anger Is Armor
Everybody in his life calls him a hothead, and nobody says it to his face. His wife measures her words at supper. His kids read the sound of the truck…
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Generational Trauma: What Gets Passed Down Quietly
Every family hands down a recipe box. Some of the cards are pure treasure. The cornbread dressing, the way your people tell stories on the porch, the hymns everybody knows…