It’s autumn and the leaves are changing. Weeding in the garden, I see a bank of clouds roll over Mary’s Peak, darker than the pervading gray. I run inside to get my raincoat and then keep weeding, pulling clumps of grass out by mud-clad roots, thistles, old lettuces, pepper plants now bare of their spicy fruit.

It’s autumn, a time for clearing out the old, making way for slumber, then reawakening.

Inside, it’s cozy. I’ve got the fire going with oak, which will burn all day. It’s cozy, but not entirely comforting because I’m missing my kids. Newly 18 and almost 20, they aren’t really kids anymore. They’ve both started college at the same time, a day apart, my eldest in Washington, my youngest, my baby, just an hour away in Eugene. I’ve been preparing for this moment for nearly twenty years, but still, I find myself sideswiped. It’s the ordinary moments that do it.  On my daughter’s first night away, knowing that she’s out exploring with friends, I find myself wondering when she’ll be home. Oh, that’s right. She won’t be home. This isn’t home anymore, not exactly. Not her forever home. Ordinarily, we would have texted about her “ETA” as we call it, but now it’s up to her to get back to her dorm safely. A deep wave of sadness hits me. Something is over, not going to be over, not someday, but now. The quality of the feeling surprises me, the whiff of darkness, as if an accident has occurred. Something has gone horribly wrong. Someone has died, but I don’t know who.

Of course, nothing is wrong. It’s only change, petals falling. Nothing stays in bloom forever.

I realize that I have loved being needed, which I knew, but did not know in quite this way. As always, it is the absence of something that delivers its substance. I’m still needed, of course, but if I’m to do my job right, I must now start to be needed less – and less and less progressively as new resources emerge in my fledged childrens’ lives. I must do this work in earnest. Of what use is it to fight the shortening of the days? If I don’t tear out those weeds, the old plants that have died, the ones that no longer bear fruit, where will the seedlings grow? There are new ways to be relevant, to be a part of things, ways that are in communion with the turning of the seasons. I can watch the weather, cultivate the ground, plant seeds for the next season’s growth.

Even as part of me is grieving, another part of me looks on and marvels. It’s not that all those years spent preparing for this day were for naught. I have a blessed life, a home I cherish, a loving husband; I have my writing, my garden, travel, too many dear friends to make time for. There is no empty nest, there is only my children, flying—or faltering, but finding their course. And yet, when what you have loved sheds its form, it is a death, even if the love remains intact. And death always surprises. There was no end run around this experience, and once again, I am awestruck by how much larger life is than my limited understanding. This comes as a relief, almost a delight. Death, change, grief – they have shocked me out of my small world as only reality can. And that means that even death brings life, even grief sparks joy, for joy is free, never chained.

If I were to cast this process in terms of analog and digital qualities, I would say that disruption is digital—discrete, discontinuous, 0s and 1s—while integration is analog, achieved by making connections, by reaching behind to the past even as we stretch forward to the future. Both disruption and integration are essential for growth. We can only integrate what has been broken. And if we never disrupt the status quo, that is itself a death.

In this instance, I like the cyclical metaphor better. The seasons and I are in accord, and that is itself a comfort. As I give my now-grown children the freedom to make their own mistakes, to falter, to grow on whatever timeline their nature decrees, I am giving myself that freedom too. The mysteries run deep; the mysteries are roots, and we are their flower.  As we allow them to strive deeper, into dark places we will never see, we move upwards, our striving toward the sun made possible by our probing of the depths. So, I’ll bank the fire and head out for another go at the garden, even though the rain is still falling, knowing there will be plenty of time later to be safe and dry, knowing there’s a season for all things.