Falling

As I sit here and look out over the river, the leaves, confetti-like in their enthusiasm to jump from the trees, fall to the ground to their final sleep. Like faithful followers drinking the poison punch, leaf after leaf falls with the turning of the wind. Soon the trees will stand naked, sleeping too, in a temporary sort of daze until the warm winds come again, next year.

Winter - the "thinning of the veil," a time when nature perfects the concept of minimalism. In the winter there is nothing blatantly grabbing your attention with a myriad of colors and wings like the flowers and insects of the other months. In the winter you have to look for it, search it out. The stillness becomes much more magnified in the winter. It magnifies and stretches and yells and screams beyond our wildest imagination -- if we can hear it. We can hear it. With the passing of every age the veil grows thinner.

My grandmother carried herself with passion, determination and an acidic bitterness for life that compares to meeting a rattlesnake face to face in the mid-day heat of a Texas August afternoon. As her memory slipped away she became more complacent, happier in her daily life,if only because she could no longer remember the travails of those who trespassed against her.

The veil had thinned. As she grew closer to the end of her life, memory or no memory, worldly importances faded and she delighted more in abstract joy without the need to magnify the darknesses she perceived around her. As the veil thinned she let more light into her life. Just as the leaves jump from the trees, thus allowing more light between the branches - thinning the veil, and thinning and thinning until it is no more.