The Grammar of Endurance

I am out walking on what is, in my estimation, the penultimate golden day of autumn. The trees, startled by last night’s freeze, are letting go of their splendor with every gust of swirling wind. There is golden sun and blue sky above me, and moody, bruised clouds at the edges of everything. The faint scent of woodsmoke swirls with the leaves, and I taste winter on the tip of my tongue. It is sharp, bright, dark, and cold. The church bells chime at the corner as if to declare it all so.

As an October child, this is my time. October is my month. This cool, golden cacophony of light and color, sound and song reminds me of who I am. I was born under a full moon into this season of harvest and decay, this season of golden light and moving shadows, of abundance turning to scarcity, of the light fading into the encroaching dark: magic, mystery, transformation, ecstatic joy turning to bitter grief. I am alive here, at the entrance to the underworld. I know this territory.

But this time, the fall of the leaves in their splendor exists alongside the fall of my nation, and I’m not quite sure how to hold those two things together at the same time.

What is there to say about autumn in a time of collapse? About the oncoming winter in an age of punishment, cold hearts, and a lack of empathy so shocking that it leaves the nervous system reeling?

What is there to say of the demolition of the national house, or of the grand ballroom built while the people go hungry and can no longer afford medical care? Of harsh detention centers or the silencing and eviction of the press, the stalking of citizens' media accounts, or the hard fist squeezing tight on women's necks? That I don’t understand it? That would not be true. I do understand. History has shown us over and over what happens when men consolidate power and use it for personal greatness. It has shown us what happens when the neoliberal mask of fairness slips, and the hunger for power and control shows its teeth. It has shown us when God is used as a ramrod.

And what of the fall of the mask of our neighbors, our friends, revealing monsters more frightening than any Halloween ghoul: cold, without heart, turning on family and strangers alike, fists raised in outrage, in lust for blood? We can say that history shows us this, too. We are not the first.

This has happened before, just not to us. I turn the corner and watch leaves rise up in an eddy of wind, and I marvel at the sight, golden leaves swirling, reaching for the branches that once held them. And at the same moment, I am reminded of the way armed men rise at powers' command, mask their faces, and turn their vengeance on immigrants and citizens alike in their own power-driven swirl. In their fervor, they stalk food banks, hospitals, schools, and homes, reaching for a height they can never attain. The farther upward they spin, the farther downward they will fall. The parallel is unbearable and true.

And yet, the trees stand. They have seen this before, maybe not this exact configuration of cruelty, but the pattern of it. They know what it means to shed what can no longer be sustained. They know when to retreat to the roots. To pull sap and blood in close, to hunker down and endure. I sometimes think they remember the fires of their ancestors, the centuries of clear-cutting and droughts that sing through their hearts like faint echoes of an ancient psalm. It is their story, written in a language we have forgotten how to understand. The scars of lightning are sutures that hold their history together. Their ancestry lives in rings and sap, in the chemical heartbeat of survival passed from root to root through the fascia of the vast, intimate mycorrhizal network underground. Trees know. And they do not mistake winter for death. They approach dormancy with genuflection, as covenant.

Science names this archival memory 'epigenetics,' but the word feels too sterile for what it is. A tree’s body records every season’s grief and every season’s plenty. It holds the knowing of every being that has touched its branches, that has eaten from its body, that has sustained its life through nut and berry, nest and shade. The droughts live in their narrow rings, the easier years widen them again, and we humans know how to read this.

My body has done the same. Illness has carved my seasons into me. I, too, learned dormancy. I, too, learned to store what light I could when the world went dark. Perhaps this is why I can feel their knowledge moving through me when I walk amongst them. They've lived through mass extinctions. Through the Little Ice Age. Through the Dust Bowl. Through clear-cuts that left mountainsides scarred and bare. And they're still here. They carry their ancestors in the chemistry of their great woody bodies, in the angle of their reaching branches, in the depth of their entangled roots. They know fire is coming because fire has always come. They know spring follows winter because that's the pattern written into their rings. Our Earthling bodies, too, speak a language older than words, older than nations, older than men’s hunger for dominion. And our own ancestors? Like the trees, they lived through such times as these. Our bones know this language. It is written there: the grammar of endurance, the alphabet of slow time.

The thing is, trees do not need us to fix this to continue being trees. We are but one species in the vast, intricate web of existence. Our collapse is real, but the trees will outlast this. They will remember this. There is something both devastating and consoling in that.

Perhaps because trees do not hope, they continue. Their faith is metabolic. Their trust is in the pattern itself: leaf, wind, root, rest, rest, return. If I listen, I can hear them whisper through the woodsmoke and the bells, reminding me that the work of winter is not to despair but to repair. Beneath the leaf-strewn ground, everything is still moving. The world is still making itself quietly, insistently, through networks of care that we cannot see. Life—death—life.

We may have forgotten, but our bodies remember. When everything in the human world begins to unravel, when the headlines and the hunger and the hatred close in, knocking us from the branches that held us, we still know how to stand with a tree. We still know how to breathe beside something older than language. The terror and the grief may take our words, may leave us emptied of thought, may make our heart beat fast and our breath come quick, but if we lay our backs against steady bark or press our palms to the sacred Earth, some deeper knowing rises. The living heart of the world pulses under the surface. It steadies us. It reminds us that belonging is not the exception but the rule written into matter itself.

Trees are generous that way. They ask nothing of us except our presence. We can sit beneath them, silent, and they will begin the quiet work of recalibrating our nervous systems to the rhythm of slow time. Their shade teaches us care. Their roots remind us that strength begins far, far deep underground. Their breath, invisible but constant, invites our lungs to match its pace. We were never meant to be separate from them. We were meant to be participants in the same liturgy of exchange. Breath for breath, carbon for oxygen, life for life.

This is what collapse cannot take from us. It has no power here. It cannot take the quiet, the soil, nor the small, holy act of remembering through the grace of our senses. And it has no dominion over our capacity to turn toward each other. It holds no sway over the radical choice to practice mercy when cruelty is rewarded, to extend empathy even when it's punished, to create small networks of mutual aid while the larger systems fail. Collapse cannot prevent us from the practice of centering care. The trees show us: care is not dependent on optimism.

It's not dependent on fair-weather days. And they practice what they know. Through underground fungal networks, parent trees feed their offspring. Neighbors share resources. The strong support the weak. They do not wait for conditions to improve before caring for each other. Care is not conditional on hope. We can feed each other even as we hunker down. We can share what little we have precisely because we know winter is coming, and we endure winter together. Perhaps most importantly, it cannot take our being. When we are unable to think our way out, we can still be our way through. To sit in fallen leaves, to feel the earth’s cold against our warm furred skin, to listen to the wind moving through branches singing the hymns our bones remember, is to sit in the presence of God.

These are conduits, the practices of remembering, of putting the body back into the web from which the scattered, anxious mind has fled. This is prayer.

I walk on. The church on the corner rings bells that have marked the hours of my life. Eleven am. Ordinary Time. These long weeks of faithfulness, each chime a reminder that time itself is sacred, that even ordinary days are ordered by prayer, stillness, and pause. The sound moves through the chilled air, carried on gusts of wind, reverberating against the clouds that have swallowed the sun. The day dims. The air sharpens. The world exhales into the season of descent.

Trained as an anthropologist, I have studied times such as these, societies on the brink, the slow violence that becomes ordinary, the subtle reconfigurations of power, the cruelty. I know what follows. I have made peace with the fact that just as those before me who knew and understood could not stop what was already in motion, neither can I. And so, in this moment, as the bells fade and the wind stirs the leaves around my body, I breathe deep. The sweet decay of leaf litter, that faint spice of woodsmoke, the wet mineral scent of autumnal soil. I allow them to enter me, to ground me in this moment, here, alongside what endures.

And I remind myself: I am here! Now. Amongst all of this. I am one of these. Not a tree, not a leaf, but close, an Earthling. The difference feels smaller than it once did. My breath joins the great respiration of the world, the eternal exchange between trees and lungs, between roots and skin. And for a moment, the boundaries blur. I am not apart from this collapse nor am I above it, but within it, living, breathing, still, as are we all.

The bells fade, and I turn toward home. The wind continues sweeping what’s left of the gold into the gutters and into the fields. It is October, and the world is still here. The trees are still here. We are still here. And that matters. Survival might not mean triumph. But it will always be testimony. It is recorded here in my blood and in my bones and in your blood and in your bones, as all survival is. The hum that moves through the roots, through the soil, through our own chests and faithful beating hearts, is the same sacred, ancient hymn of persistence that has carried the great above and the great below through all of the ages.

The earth has weathered empires before. It will weather ours. But while we are here, we can still kneel in the leaves, still touch bark, still listen. We can still remember what it means to belong to a world that does not need us and yet allows us to be part of its breathing.

We can remember that care, in the end, is all that matters.

And that is enough.

That is everything.