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Fall’s Wake: How nature can help us learn acceptance

How to grieve the end of fall. It’s a miniature grief, but one that matters if we really attend to it. If we pay attention, we can learn a little about beauty, development, grief, and hope.

Minimal composition of bare tree branches against a gray sky
Fall is over, autumn has ended, and that is a good kind of grieving process

For me, fall is the high point of the year in terms of natural beauty, and the end of fall is always sad. So the end of fall is always a little difficult for me. But this year, I am noticing more what that means and how acceptance of this little grief is really good.

Fallen leaves with bare trees in the background, help to illustrate how fall's end is grief in miniature, but that acceptance of that ending is worthwhile
For awhile, the ground is blanketed with beautiful forms. Late Fall Forest by Theodore Tollefson

But this year, I started to notice something. Something like the end of a season is a grieving process in miniature. From psychology we have the Kubler-Ross, or DABDA, model of grief:

  • Denial
  • Anger
  • Bereavement
  • Depression
  • Acceptance

These words are a little strong for what most of us experience at the end of our favorite season of the year, but I have wondered if failing to recognize that there is a little miniature grieving process might play into Seasonal Affective Disorder — for those who have it. And just the general fall/winter doldrums for those who don’t.

It sounds funny to talk about it in these terms, but we all have bad days when something that we like is over.

DABDA for the end of fall

Here is how I would map a small life event like the end of a gloriously beautiful season to the DABDA model:

  • Denial: I know that I start by trying to convince myself that peak fall color isn’t really past — not yet — it can’t be!
  • Anger: I don’t generally get angry — maybe frustrated that it’s over.
  • Bereavement: I feel a little sense of loss when it is clear that the colored leaves are dwindling.
  • Depression: There is a kind of sadness when I realize that fall is in fact now really over. When all of the pockets of bright color have gone away.
  • Acceptance: This year I noticed that when I accept that fact, I can look for different kinds of beauty and make different images.

We live in a way that separates us from nature, and so we become ignorant of the way its rhythms affect us, but they still do. People who work in helping professions know about the full moon. We all feel different when the days get shorter and the weather gets colder.

What nature can teach us about grief and acceptance

Maybe it would help just to acknowledge that, yeah, I do feel a little sense of loss when the bright leaves are all gone. But I think that the benefits extend a little further than just awareness.

If so, then every season has something to teach us about our own psychological developmental. We get practice at being mindful and intentional in life’s difficult phases by being a little more attentive and intentional with these little endings.

Leaves on the forest floor are have a beautiful shape, texture and form, and it is worth looking down to see them.
These leaves are not less beautiful for being dry and fallen, but you have to look down once in a while to enjoy them. Late-fallen #1 by Theodore Tollefson

Acceptance shows that even fallen leaves are beautiful

There is good in the process. There is something salutary in noticing and giving a little time to processes of loss. Even little ones. And there is hope and beauty scattered like dead leaves at the end of fall, just there to be appreciated.

We can walk through this process in a concrete, physical way by just planning to go for a hike on a short, gray December day.

The woods is now a lot quieter. Many have forgotten it, and many overlook it because it is not exhibiting one of the stereotyped, expected forms of beauty. Now that its bright colors are gone, it is easy to forget that it is still beautiful.

The TV is gray when it’s off. Nature too, it can seem. But nature is never off.

A sycamore in the dark lit by the full moon shows that if we can accept the end of fall's beauty, even short days and long nights can reveal another kind
Short days do not hide all beauty. In fact, they reveal some. Ghost Sycamore by Theodore Tollefson

Be aware of different kinds of beauty

The woods now has a different beauty — not the lush or vivid. Instead it is settled and prepared for what we all know is coming: cold, hard winds, rain, snow, ice storms.

We expect certain kinds of beauty because we no longer need to know what lies in between. If it doesn’t look like an illustration of Thanksgiving, it can feel like beauty is until spring.

But that’s wrong.

Thanksgiving is over. The riotous, festive colors of fall are gone, but celebrations are not celebrations without something in between. And most of life is lived between parties.

A woods after fall, and before the snow, can show you something about acceptance of the liminal, the transitional, the interstitial, and, really, the most humdrum, typical spans of life.

Fallen leaves show a different kind of beauty. One reachable only through acceptance.
These fallen leaves is dry, but beautiful. It is no longer living and perfect, but it has contours, patterns, and structure that it didn’t show before. Late-fallen #2 by Theodore Tollefson

This death is now also a beginning. It is a blank space on which the new season will be drawn. That does not make it bad. And it is not wrong to let it speak to the parts of your life that are the same.

Take a moment to stand in the woods. Sit if you can find a place that’s dry. And if your life has come to a season like this, some change so profound that you feel like things are falling apart. There is a trail to acceptance. And this is where new glory can emerge.

— quoting myself in the Instagram post that inspired this one

Recharging in nature is good for those around you

Maybe you’re more concerned about someone close to you. But taking time to understand the rhythms of nature and to recharge from it gives you access to a peace that you can carry with you. It is a way to find what is beautiful and enduring in them and to hope for them when they maybe cannot.

A frost-rimed plant shows that delicacy and beauty inhere even in a dreary season
Frost happens in the late fall and early winter. Frozen Morning by Theodore Tollefson

Watch for it, and you will see the frost dress everything in lace and diamonds — a momentary promise of things to come.

How will you notice, absorb, process, and share the settled silence of fall’s end? How will that matter to you and the people near you?

Frosty teasel on a calm morning illustrates the kind of serenity that comes after the little grief and acceptance associated with the close of autumn
This frosty teasel at sunrise shows the beauty of the time between fall and winter — Frosty Teasel by Theodore Tollefson

This post is one in which I invite you to muse, in others I invite you to meditate or create, check them out to read more. This an expansion on today’s Instagram post. Join me there if you’re on Instagram. Or mention me on Twitter if you share this there.

By Theodore

Theodore is a photographer whose objective is to make images that help you meditate on the good.