Fall | Contemplative Inquiry

Alney Island at midday on 9 November. Looking up, I encountered a bleak majesty of now skeletal trees. Muted sunlight found its way through the grey clouds. In contrast, the river at my side retained a full, lush beauty.

As I walked, the tranquility of the scene was compromised at times by anxiety. The island is a wetland. It had been raining. More rain was due. The paths were puddled and muddy. The grass was soft and wet, half hiding twigs, leaves and slippery earth. I am still not fully recovered from my fall and this walk was a deliberate escalation in challenge. When I reached Richard’s Wood I stumbled over a tree root and nearly fell. At the same time I was able to enjoy a rich carpet of leaves at this late period in the leaf fall.

Among the trees I contemplated branches as living sculpture. It was as if I had reached a destination. Generally the branches were still holding on to at least some leaves. There were even new ones, in this fecund space. Eventually, my encounter with the wood completed, I turned round and made my cautious way home.

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October 29, 2025

RETURN TO THE WATER MARGIN

For the first time since I fractured my shoulder in a heavy fall, I have walked beside the Gloucester canal. The period between 2pm and 4.30 on 28 October was particularly auspicious. Cool but clear. Blue sky and sunshine.

On this occasion, as I tentatively walked the paths, I found myself in a living world dominated by yellow and green. A fall was happening, but was not very advanced. I noticed my confidence in walking becoming more consistent and reliable. I felt good. I was at ease in the woodland world.

The walk was part of my coming to terms with an advancing age, in which the possibility of a damaging fall is priced in. I felt a little nostalgic for a distant past. At a time when I was impatiently looking forward to my fourth birthday I fell down a flight of stairs and simply got up again. I was pleased to have a story to tell my parents, but couldn’t understand their alarm when I told it. 1953 is indeed another country.

However most of my attention, on this walk, was on the walk itself. Pragmatically, it needed to be, and I was also increasingly held by the spirit of place and time on this benign late October day. I had a strong sense of here, now and home.

I had a goal of reaching a newly refurbished bridge for pedestrians and cyclists only. This would give me time to turn around and get home before sunset (roughly 4.45 now that the clocks have changed). A slowish two and a half hours is as much as I can manage as yet. From a recovery perspective, I feel on track.

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August 17, 2025

PARK TREES IN A DRY SEASON

Yesterday evening I went to my local park and was struck by changes in the trees. I seemed to have walked into a premature autumn. Trees were shedding leaves. To me, the trees in the picture above appeared distressed. Looking at them again now, I wonder about disease as well as simple unseasonal shedding.

In the park, I found beauty too, with new colours becoming manifest. In my part of the world, the latter part of August has always included intimations of Autumn. But 2025 feels unusually dramatic and unusually early. Some trees, like the horse chestnut below, seem to be shedding their leaves particularly fast.

Other trees seemed to be weathering this period more easily, like these medlars now bearing their fruit – bringing autumn into August in an apparently unstressed way.

Standing back, I could see new patterns in the no longer quite so green Greenwood. They illustrate new conditions and are, for better or worse, harbingers of a new time. There will be more changes. I hope that the trees will continue to adapt and stay in place for many years to come. But nothing is certain, in this time of climate crisis and the rise of willed ignorance about its severity.

The sunsets continue to get earlier. I walked into one as I left the park. The sun asserted it’s power in a late stage of its descent. It’s been a hot summer as well as a dry one. I took this powerful, almost too powerful, late summer solar image with me as I walked back to my home.

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November 26, 2023

LATE FALL IMAGES

Recently I’ve been unwell and housebound, hardly even watching the world go by. But there came a day when I could go out again, a day that was blessed with sun. It seemed bright and new. I was almost blinded by its luminous presence on a white tree-patterned wall. I had entered late fall, a season with both autumnal and winter features.

The sun shone on trees in Gloucester City Park which retained some of their foliage, but in an end-of-season way that signals austere changes to come. Leaves showed a fragile, lingering beauty, prior to their necessary descent.

The Brunswick Gardens, sitting under a clear blue sky, were home to trees where the leaves had already fallen, leaving the branches as patterns of quiescent arboreal bones. The leaves were on the lawn. Other, managed, flora continued to flourish.

In visual and tactile ways, after an indoor confinement, the neighbourhood was full of reward for me. But I felt cold, and it was indeed the coldest it’s been for many many months. I could not stay out for long. But I had encountered a moment in the year, of interbeing, of living presence – where the wheel is visibly and palpably turning. I was glad to be there, however briefly, available for a nurturing and healing experience.

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October 23, 2022

FALLING: 2022

Vivid autumn colour signals a fall. Where I live, we are early in the process as yet. These leaves seem poignantly glorious to me. I respond to a beauty that I know will be short-lived. The tree is immersed in a cycle of dying and regeneration that furthers its larger life. Any sense of poignancy, glory and beauty is about me, being human.

I think of the last thirty years, and my own small deaths and regenerations over this period as I journeyed from my early forties to my early seventies. At the beginning I sensed a pull towards new priorities, which roughly fitted the Jungian notion of the second half of life as having different goals from the first. I experienced a nudge towards an inward, psycho-spiritual turn. I developed interests in experiential inquiry, Druidry/Western Mysteries, and contemplative spirituality, as part of this mid-life nudge.

This reduced my interest in career, acquisition and influence – though such interest had always been limited. In the nineties and noughties, I didn’t need a lot of money both to live well, if modestly, and accrue a reasonable retirement income. It would be much harder now. I am grateful to have experienced (relatively) favourable times, though of course the seeds of our current crises were already being sown.

Now I am ready for a new chapter, as my wife Elaine and I get ready to move to a new place of our own in Gloucester. The next move is into a smaller, more manageable space, and will involve elements of de-cluttering. I am the same tree but I will be shedding leaves and waiting for new ones to grow next year. In the moment I feel fragile, though my unknowing about the future also has an edge of wonder about the magic that may unfold. Falling is an oddly potent process at a special time of year.

Contemplative Inquiry

Tag: Fall

November 10, 2025

MIDDAY ON ALNEY ISLAND