I walk the hillside gathering twigs that I will use as tinder for fires on cold nights, an annual custom that I began three decades ago. The air carries the fragrance of fallen leaves and coming rain. For one brief moment, the sun breaks through the layers of cloud and I turn to see it kiss the treetops as they dance, tall and bright, against the charcoal sky. I add the moment to my twig bin along with a fallen gold leaf. Remind me, I say to it, the next time that I touch you, of this warm and shining day when I saw the sun brushing the mid-October leaves and watched them shimmer in its sudden light.
One of the things that the Great Yes wanted to experience was being a maple tree whose leaves would turn scarlet in fall. And so he did. And on one perfect October afternoon when the sun was warm and a cool breeze was waltzing through its scarlet leaves, the maple tree danced, and the Yes sang this wondrous moment down into his very atoms in perfect and absolute joy.
In case your mind is longing for ease, in case your heart is in need of a song, in case you need to remember that, in the wider world, beauty dwells, the Great Yes placed this love flame in the midst of the pines to dance, its crimson and gold leaves whispering, “Be at peace, Child. All is well.”
You show us our greediness, autumn. We walk through your perfect falling leaves, through the exquisite textures and colors of you, grasping the moment so tightly, wanting it never to end, or at least to slow so we can take in every detail. And yet the dance itself is at the heart of the beauty. And the song can only sing if we let the music play.
You must love these days, I say to the ancient maple, as I stand beneath its spread boughs gazing in awe at its leaves, orange and lemon and crimson, dancing in the sun. How could you not feel proud and triumphant to have produced such a glorious display! How I hope our human adulations satisfy and touch your soul. I hope you feel it. I hope you know. This is what it’s all for, isn’t it? These precious days of splendor. The rest, the shade and whispering songs, and seeds, and perches, and nests, were simply gracious gifts that you bestowed along the way because your core is made of Yes and love. And now we get to see it, writ large, in flaming letters that dance in joy beneath this autumn sky.
“Remember,” motivational speaker and author, T. Harv Eker told his audience, “What you focus on expands. As I often say in our training, ‘Where attention goes, energy flows and results show.’”
That’s far more than a slick little slogan; it’s an explanation of how things work.
Know anybody who’s always telling you about the things that go wrong, for instance? I don’t mean the little things that go off-kilter in a given day, like when you can’t find anything you’re looking for and you always put things in the same place, or in order to do what you want to do, you have to do something else first and then something else before that, or when everything you touch seems to slide right out of your hands. Not that kind of thing. I mean someone whose life, to hear him tell it, is a magnet for troubles, one grand string of crises and setbacks and blind alleys after another. You know one of those?
I had a friend like that once. And there was no denying that bad luck seemed to cling to him like a cloud. The things that happened to him weren’t trivial or his recounting of them overblown. But over time I noticed that he never talked about anything else.
One day I asked him if he ever heard about gratitude rocks and I told him the story about a man, somewhere in Africa if I remember correctly, who brought a handful of pebbles from the creek to his village and told his neighbors that they were gratitude rocks and possessed of a great power. If you carried one in your pocket, he told them, and every time your fingers happened to touch the stone you thought of one thing for which you were grateful, unexpected blessings would befall you.
The people began to notice all kinds of good fortune coming their way. Soon, they began collecting and painting rocks and selling them to others as gratitude rocks, and in time the entire village prospered.
I took a polished pebble from my collection and gave it to him. “Feel it in your hand right now,” I told him. “Feel its size and shape, its texture and temperature. Now think of one thing you’re grateful for. It can be anything, big or small.”
My friend’s face fell. He literally could not think of a single thing. I asked him what he had for lunch, and asked him what he liked best about it. “There’s you first thing to be grateful for!” I smiled when he said that the bread was fresh.
Weeks went by before I heard from him again. Then one night he called to tell me that he’d been having a surprising stretch of nothing-going-wrong. He almost felt superstitious about telling me, he said, as if he might be tempting fate. “Maybe that gratitude thing works after all,” he said, chuckling kind of shyly.
I laughed and told him now he could be grateful for gratitude, and he laughed with me. I won’t say that things turned around for him overnight. But his conversations began to be sprinkled with little mentions of things he was noticing and enjoying that he would have discounted or overlooked a month or two ago.
The stories we tell ourselves about what’s going on in our lives—many of them “sticky stories” that we tell ourselves over and over—are energy patterns. Every time our attention gets hooked in them, we’re giving them our mental and emotional energy, and we tend to re-create the same kind of pattern over and over in our lives. What we focus on expands. That’s why it’s important to listen to your stories.
In your dominant stories, are you a victim or a victor? Do you always lose or do you always find a way to succeed? Are you irritated and angry with others, or do you strive to be patient and kind? See where you’re investing your energy, and notice the results. If you like them, keep on telling those kinds of stories. If not, well, here: take this smooth little pebble. (Better yet, go find a little pebble or safety pin or button of your own right now.) Feel it in your hand. Now think of something you’re grateful for and put it in your pocket. And put it in your pocket tomorrow, too, and the next day and the next. And every time your fingers touch it, think of something you’re grateful for. Even if it’s nothing more than not having lost your pebble yet.
You just might be surprised how powerful a little redirection of your energy can be. As Eker told folks, “results show.”
Every last particle—even those of the tree bark, and those of the stones and the soil in the field, even those so buoyant that they float in the air forming clouds and those that make up the air itself—every one of them feels the touch of this autumn morning’s light and resonates to the song of its gold.
Once upon a magical time in a season we called ‘autumn,’ we would wake to a world suddenly bathed in dancing colors. The ten thousand leaves on the ten thousand trees, one by one would trade their green for crimson, or flaming orange, for lemon or lime or gold. And day by day the colors would grow more intense, until the whole world seemed to be singing with them. And these magical leaves could fly, too. Down they would spiral in a twirling, giddy ballet, sailing through the air like birds suddenly set free from their wooden cages, their brilliant bodies piling, one atop the other, in a quilt of color on the grasses and rocks and shores. And we would gasp at the beauty of it all, and give thanks that we had eyes to see.
It’s impossible to speak here in this pine woods, standing at the feet of giants. What could you say anyway? How could mere words have any value? “Thank you,” maybe. But you sense that they already know what’s in your heart.
The gifts are free for your taking, inexhaustibly and everywhere. Every single moment holds them, especially the one we call Now. It’s a willingness to see them that makes them happen. So wake in the morning with a vow to receive the ones your soul most needs: goodness, beauty, forgiveness, truth. And let it be your soul that decides, so that your heart may swell in humble joy as you realize the very gifts which you most truly desired are here before you, always, and free for the taking.
