Whiteoak Canyon Trail

On a September afternoon in 2015, the yellow leaf hung by a single silk thread along Virginia’s Whiteoak Canyon Trail. That morning, our car played a game of sorts, curling back and forth to ascend Skyline Drive, the five of us friends inside all gobbled up by the foggy hillsides. But here, the trail opened up to the stream running along with it, and floating in the late-summer-almost-fall breeze was a yellow leaf. It was precisely 12:06:33 PM on the 5th of September, one of those post-August days when summer’s excitement sinks away with the resignation that winter will come, and not even a silk thread can suspend summer’s fall. But summer’s end leads us to desire it even more. The clearer the picture of beauty we have, the more we will want to see it come alive in the world. “This new hunger is the first sign of God’s presence,” Henri Nouwen writes in Making All Things New. “When we remain attentive to this divine presence, we will be led always deeper into the kingdom. There, to our joyful surprise, we will discover that all things are being made new.”