Where the Leaves Fall

When I was a kid, I believed that if you caught a falling leaf before it touched the ground you could make a wish on it. As soon as it touched the earth, magic was lost—transitioning its value to leaf piles and leaf forts. My siblings and I would walk with our heads tilted back, waiting for the tress to release their blessings to us. Autumn was a time of plenty.

As an adult I still tip my head back and reach out for the crisp leaves. I no longer believe in tooth fairies, gnomes, Peter Pan, or secret wishes. But perhaps now, I might be a greater believer in magic than I ever was. These falling leaves are not some careless mechanical motions of the world but an “extravagant gesture of heaven.” When I run my hand across the rough bark of the Bur Oak, the artwork of its patchwork skin, or the intricacy of its rings, xylem and phloem, its delicate cells walled in cellulose, a miracle runs underneath my hand.

I see the sun come up every morning. It’s a tradition that started when I arrived at university. I race out of bed to see the sun’s rays break the pink sky—a daily display of grandeur in an Iowa sky. My morning perch overlooks a little fragment of prairie surrounded by oceans of corn. A little ship tossed in the waves of a great ocean. At one point in time, 80% of the state was blanketed by the tall grass prairie—full of bright colors and busy pollinators. Now, less than 0.1% remains. Iowa’s tall grass prairie is functionally extinct. Robin Kimmerer wrote, “Biodiversity is the imagination of the earth.” My home, Iowa, was once a place rich in imagination. Now, monoculture, rows of corn, uniform green lawns, and parking lots dominate the landscape. My little patch of prairie stands as a little tin soldier—a reminder of what has been lost.

It’s so funny that so unnatural a thing disguises itself as normal.

I ended up at a university in Iowa to study Environmental Science. I used to be scared to tell people what my major was—I struggled to answer people’s “What does that mean?” There is the academic answer: “The study of how the Earth's natural environment interacts with its physical, chemical, and biological components.” Then my casual answer: it means I look at how ecosystems work, how the systems all fit together. What happens if the nutrient content in the pond is too high? How would that affect the bird that perches nearby? How will that affect the wood that surrounds this little pond? Where did those nutrients come from in the first place? I try and explain, I study plants and soil and water, but I also study people and communities.

But saying both these answers out loud always feels so incomplete. They describe what I study in my classes. They describe what my job someday might look like. But they fail to describe what it means to live in the world as an environmental scientist. How can I explain that studying environmental science, loving creation, means mourning is a constant part of my work?

I follow in David’s cries in the Psalms: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning?”

I was 15 when the last male white rhino died. I sobbed on the drive home. Since then, I have shed many tears, tears over endangered species, cut down forests, bleached coral, plastic- poisoned whales, and landfills filled with food. Many people can look at a tree without knowing the story of the forest that once stood there. But I can’t. Environmental Scientists can’t. We will mourn for what the rest of the world does not see. That is our job.

But If I am to follow in David’s cries, I believe my lament must also follow in David’s hope and trust: “The poor will eat and be satisfied; those who seek the Lord will praise him—may your hearts live forever!”

I do not know what the future holds for this globe and its creatures. I am scared more than I would like to admit. When I try and explain the magic of leaves, often people are no more than amused. And when I cry for the loss of great forests, blue oceans, and my little patchwork piece of a prairie, it is a lonely thing. But the words of theologian Abraham Kuyper are my comfort and calling:

[The] root evil that Jesus was combatting lay in the fact that people, because they worked, thought they had worked alone, forgetting that in their work none other than God himself was working. -- People assumed that where they worked, God did not work, and where God worked, they did not have to work.

My lament ends in rejoice. Lord God, “You were before all things, you created all things, and in you all things are held together. There is no corner of creation you will fail to redeem. You are the Lord of Lords and King of Kings, O Jesus Christ, our King of Everything. Amen.”

My Father in heaven wept the first tears for this world. He has and is working toward the redemption and restoration of His good creation.

It was a little white house where I was first introduced to the magic of leaves. It was pushed back in the lot so there was virtually no backyard except for the three mulberry trees that scrapped against the back wall. The front yard stretched out into a little thicket, which when you are child-sized, makes for very fine 100-acre wood. But the very best part of the place was that it was situated on the corner of two dead ends. The expanse past the dead end was made up of the woods that lead to Beaver Park. This little corner of the world was my cathedral. Light through fall leaves made for grand stained-glass windows. The sky, filled with cloud castles, was finer than any painted dome, and no piece of carved stone made for a better alter than a good tree stump.

This place no longer really exists. The house is no longer painted white, and almost all the trees that made up my kingdom were blown down in the Horatio. Only my memory of it remains. But it is the memory of this place that makes me cling to Wendell’s Vision:

If we will have the wisdom to survive, to stand like slow-growing trees on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it--- then a long time after we are dead the lives our lives prepare will live there, their houses strongly placed upon the valley sides, fields and gardens rich in the windows. The river will run clear, as we will never know it, and over it, birdsong like a canopy.

Some claim that this is a foolish hope. I can’t blame them really. History is on their side. But as I reach out for a falling leaf of gold—this beautiful, extravagant, miracle, I choose to hope and believe.

References

• Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2022, 11
• Kimmerer, Robin Wall. “Tallgrass” Little Toller Books, November 27, 2018.
• Kimmerer, “Tallgrass”
• Gosalvez, Emma. “What Can I Do with an Environmental Science Degree?” College of Natural Resources News, October 27, 2020.
• Psalm 22:1 6
• Psalm 22:26
• Abraham Kuyper, Common Grace: God’s Gifts for a Fallen World, Vol II. Translated by Nelson D. Kloosterman and Ed M. van der Maas (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2019), 512
• McKelvey, Douglas Kaine, Ned Bustard, and Pete Peterson. Every moment holy. volume 1. Nashville, TN: Rabbit Room Press, 2019, 278
• Berry, Wendell. Collected Poems, 1957-1982. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985., “A Vision”