Hidden Beauty Revealed

Prasanta Verma

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Senescent (adjective)

  1. growing old; aging.
  2. Cell Biology. (of a cell) no longer capable of dividing but still alive and metabolically active.

 

As in: trees laughing leaves, dropping down on me, floating in the wind.
I catch a handful of laughter, toss it back in the air.

 

As in: the hidden beauty in growing old, in death, revealed and witnessed through vibrant colors of burnt orange, flaming scarlet, deep gold. As the leaves die, they do so gloriously.

 

Should there be this much beauty in so much dying?

The tree, another year older, yields to the process of time and change. I, too, am another year older, passing through another autumn, counting the number of autumns remaining.

 

I watch the youthful greens of summer disappear as quickly as they came.

I soon will see the tree, standing in the middle of winter like a stark, bare skeleton with spindly limbs. But only its leaves will have died; it is still alive and breathing, waiting for its time to bloom again.

 

The world continues to spin, and I am holding on. Holding on to something. To what? Youth? Impatient desires? Wrong motives? Grudges? Bitterness?

Release (verb)

  1. To set free
  2. To give way to
  3. To liberate
  4. To cast

 

As in: the beauty of letting go, of surrender, like the tree succumbing to the cold of winter without its luscious wrap of leaves.

 

There is beauty in release. I can let go, just like the leaves. The abscission zone is where this letting go happens in the leaves, where they separate and drop to the ground.

I have layers, too, I know, just as we all do. Protective layers. Boundary lines. But there are also separation layers, places where I hold on for too long, or too tightly. Places I need to let go. My own abscission zones. These places hold the promise of life, if I am not grasping too hard to what I think I must hold onto.

 

But, when I do manage to release what should be let go (grudges, bitterness, entitlements) I see the lines of mirth and hues of grace in an aging autumn.

 

And in me.

 

“I should have remembered, though, that the life of the spirit is never static. We’re born on one level, only to find some new struggle toward wholeness gestating within. That’s the sacred intent of life, of God– to move us continuously toward growth, toward recovering all that is lost and orphaned within us and restoring the divine image imprinted on our soul,” writes Sue Monk Kidd, in When the Heart Waits.

 

That’s the sacred intent of life, of God– to move us continuously toward growth, toward recovering all that is lost and orphaned within us and restoring the divine image imprinted on our soul.

 

I’ve been on a recovery mission to find that divine imprint. Amidst the roughness of days, walking in throes of loss and ache, I lost that vision. I couldn’t see the beauty that I once had seen.

 

 

But in letting go—accepting what I cannot change, letting go of myself—truth is unshackled.

Joy erupts. Hope is reborn. Delight roams unfettered, unchained. Love emerges, uncaged.

 

The beauty happens in the letting go, not in the holding on.

I can see who God is again.

I can see myself again.

 

***

Header Image credit: castleguard on Pixabay

Forest image: Artem Saranin on Pexels

Leaf image: Aaron Burden on unsplash

Last forest image: jplenio on Pixabay

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