I had just flipped a U-turn at the top of South Fork Canyon and started heading back down when I saw it—first only a lazy V of a large, dark bird gliding above the road. Its slow, effortless steadiness convinced me it was a raptor. I watched it, curious, until it banked. That’s when the light caught its tail: a bright white flare against the darker mountain slope.

My heart lifted. My foot eased off the gas.

“Look at its tail lights,” my wife said—her perfect name for that bright white patch announcing exactly what we were seeing before the head ever came into view.

It rose and settled on the top of a tall spruce—a bald eagle perched like a sentry where we’d least expected it. It sat for a long moment, fully revealed: white hood, yellow beak, dark body, white tail, yellow talons. No hurry. No fear. Just quiet sovereignty.

Then it launched.

Trees don’t grow from the ground—they grow from the air.

Here’s how: leaves pull in carbon dioxide, and sunlight breaks the molecule apart, sending the oxygen back into the sky while keeping the carbon.

Step by step, the tree stitches that carbon into sugars, then into cellulose and wood. It’s a slow, steady assembly line powered entirely by light—sunlight turning into substance.

And it raises a curious question: which came first—the carbon dioxide or the leaf? The leaf can’t exist without carbon, yet the carbon doesn’t become anything without the leaf. Life seems to answer by moving in circles, not lines—a continual exchange, each step borrowing from the one before.

Someone recently gifted me this perspective. I was struck—no, dumbstruck—with one more example of Nature’s full-circle nature. Pun intended.

Madeleine L’Engle once borrowed this phrase for a story about time, light, and the battle between darkness and hope. I’ve borrowed it again because the title itself feels like a season—something on the move, as if the world were leaning toward winter. We speak that way every fall, saying the planet is “tilting” or “turning away from the sun,” when in truth it isn’t.

Earth’s axis holds firm, steady at twenty-three and a half degrees, like a door slightly ajar.

What changes isn’t the tilt but our relationship to the light.

As we orbit, the sun’s angle shifts across our sky, and everything else—shadow, temperature, mood—follows. It feels as if the world itself is sliding off balance, but the truth is simpler and more beautiful: the constancy of that angle is what gives us the seasons.

We don’t always see, hear, or smell what others once did. Those who named plants, though, must have. They lingered long enough to catch the quiver, the sting, the fragrance. A name becomes a shorthand for attention—a memory pressed into language.

Every fall, it’s hard not to notice quaking aspens as they briefly burst into yellow before dropping their leaves. I recently found myself standing solo in a sacred grove of yellow giants as the wind swept down the canyon. I could hear the gust coming toward me, then surround me, then pass. Eyes closed, I could have still tracked the wind as it moved along.

The word quaking isn’t fanciful. An autumn wind wakes each tree in turn. Leaves shimmer—silver to green to silver again—before settling as the gust slips down the draw. To me, it’s just motion. To someone listening closely, it was quaking. The name carries the sound of the mountain itself.

With the seasons changing, I’m writing this in near-dark early one morning. My screen glows in my face—an otherworldly glow that illuminates my workspace. Out of habit, I unplugged my device right after I woke—we both should be fully charged. I’m awake and rested myself, yet I feel untethered—unsure about my own connection. How do I get there? How do I reach the same level of fully charged for the day ahead?

The Apostle Paul once urged that we be “rooted and grounded in love” (Ephesians 3:17). He mixed his metaphors with purpose—roots sinking deep into soil, foundations fastened to bedrock. Stability. Nourishment. Strength. In another letter he urged believers to remain “stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel” (Colossians 1:23). To be grounded, Paul insists, is not optional.

Jesus said the same in simpler terms: “Abide in me, and I in you… for without me ye can do nothing” (John 15:4–5). Disconnected, we wither. Abiding, we flourish. Made of glass and circuitry, my phone wouldn’t last more than 24 hours on its own. Can I?