The Diary of Falling Leaves

I walk this path often enough. And yet today feels different...Just a while ago, a strange reverie seized me, and I wrote at length, my eyes brimming with tears!

Pulling myself away from that enchanting dream, I washed my face. An hour from now, I'd decided, I'd sit down to finish the rest. But...I can't find what I'd written. It happened once before, long ago...the whole thing is bewildering! There's still a daze upon me, the matter remains obscure.

This path is terribly remote. This time I began walking barefoot...nature tries to break the silence with the rustling of leaves, but it only deepens it.

Looking at these great trees, a strange awareness returns to me...their leaves are falling slowly...yet they stand as if mute. Why do trees shed their leaves at the turn of winter? Nature's laws are perfectly, relentlessly exact.

I find a deep kinship between trees and people—these falling leaves...they seem like life's own small and large chapters. That even the faintest stirring of feeling persists in any living being, in man or in tree, seems to me a subtle mystery of creation itself.

A person devoid of feeling is no different from a lifeless, inert thing...Tell me, does feeling express itself so easily? Trees do not weep, do not laugh, and yet how much pain do they bear?

Birds have crowded the porch today...rushing about frantically; how different is their way of expressing feeling! What fortune belongs to humans—that even in sorrow, in joy, in the deepest anguish, they can choose to smile if they wish.

Tell me, does the sky share anything of human feeling?—For the first time in long, clouds have gathered...I sense a downpour is coming; that moment when heavy clouds part and the rain falls has always filled me with a strange awe; I wonder how much sorrow must pile upon a person before they can truly weep!

A good listener spends most of their life merely in understanding; but a person of extraordinary feeling can transcend even themselves...like a tree. There is a vast difference between the capacity to endure and the act of endurance itself; it is easy to grasp—simply learn, once, to forgive yourself.