One of the places that I almost always experience God is in Creation. Which is why I love to hike or walk, work out in my yard, or just be outside. There is something about the beauty, the harmony, the complexity, the paradoxes, the appeal to all the senses, and the proximity as well as the variety of flora and fauna that fascinates me. It draws out the praise and wonder in me.

I have been mowing grass and tending yards since I was about eleven. In addition to babysitting and pet/house/plant sitting, it was how I earned money back in the day. It started one Saturday when a neighbor, Mr. Hill, came looking for my older brother to mow his yard. My dad was mowing and I was trimming the edges with the clippers (in the days before string trimmers) and raking up miscellaneous cuttings. My brother wasn’t around, but my dad looked over at me and told Mr. Hill that he would teach me to mow and send me over. Which is what happened. I soon had a thriving business with many of the neighbors. It paid better than babysitting, but it was also a lot more work. I had been trained to my dad’s standards for what a tidy, well-manicured lawn might be, and that meant everything trimmed, raked, and swept with not a stray leaf in sight.

Fast forward several decades. I still find a tidy yard attractive, but I am also learning to appreciate letting nature take its course. Not out of laziness, because I actually still really love mowing. It’s very Zen to me: there is instant gratification. But in the last several years, I have learned about the “Leave the Leaves” campaign. It’s an effort to encourage people not to vacuum up every leaf or twig or whatever that falls into their yard and to just leave the leaves. Why? Because an enormous number of insects, invertebrates, birds, and small mammals use that detritus for foraging, nesting, or drinking the rainwater caught in the leaves. It also keeps all the leaf litter out of landfills in places where there is no composting.

I started thinking about this as a metaphor for our spiritual journeys. It would be nice to think that life and our relationship with God was neat, trim, tidy, and always on an upward, straight-ahead linear progression. But, at least for me, that is not the case. Life happens, questions arise, storms come along, there are other beings with whom I inhabit this earth. There are so many things – really almost everything – that are not under my control. (And for that we can probably all be thankful!)

Life, like the seasons, is cyclical and I believe that our spiritual journeys are as well. Not like a circle, but like a slinky or a spring. We come back around to things that are familiar, but we are not quite the same as we were when we encountered them before. Life has happened. So, what if some of the depth and beauty and joy of our spiritual journey comes out of the loose ends, the seemingly unconnected detritus of life that accumulates like leaves in the fall? What if God is deep at work, like all the little microorganisms in the stuff on the ground, repurposing it, redeeming it, turning it into rich compost to help us grow and flourish? Let’s leave the leaves. Both in our lawns and in our lives.