There’s a hush that arrives before the leaves surrender their green. A pause so small it’s almost imaginary—like the breath before someone speaks a truth they’ve kept hidden for too long. The sun’s angle grows tender, the shadows lengthen and hesitate. This threshold between seasons—what in Swedish we call brytningstid—is not a clean cut but a gradual tilting of the light.
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I’ve learned that the heart recognizes this shift long before the mind does. It’s not a melancholy so much as a summons: a call to look at the way all things slip from one form into another. In Buddhism, we do not see this as loss. It is the river of becoming, the same river that has carried us from breath to breath, birth to birth, leaf to leaf.
The Silence Before the Turning
In the Jātaka tales there is one story I return to each autumn, perhaps because it, too, carries the weight of the season’s hush. It tells of a Bodhisattva—the one who in a later life would be born as the Buddha Shakyamuni—wandering in the high mountains as summer was giving way to cold winds. There he encountered a starving tigress and her five cubs, all too weak to draw breath. Moved by compassion so complete it made no calculation, he laid down his body as nourishment for her and her young.
(Scholars refer to this as the “Hungry Tigress Jātaka,” where the Bodhisattva sacrifices himself to feed a tigress who, in her desperation, might devour her cubs.)
What brings that scene to mind is what unfolded lifetimes later: when he was reborn as the Buddha. Those same beings—the tigress and her five cubs—reappeared as five wandering ascetic practitioners. They were his old companions from the years he had spent in severe yogic austerities, practices he eventually left behind after realizing that physical practices alone could not lead to liberation.
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When the newly awakened Buddha met them again near Deer Park, they were skeptical—seeing him as one who had strayed from their path of discipline. But as they listened to what he had realized under the Bodhi tree, their minds, already ripened by long practice and past karma, opened. Some of them came to realization during that very first teaching, known as the First Turning of the Wheel of Dharma. What had once been an act of sacrifice returned as the blossoming of wisdom. The circle closed, quietly, with a tenderness that autumn seems to understand.
The Autumn Lesson
Now, when I walk beneath thinning branches, I notice the way each leaf lets go—gently, without bitterness. They drift down in spirals, soft as the memory of a promise fulfilled. There’s no argument with the wind, no bargaining with the tree. I am inspired—reminded—what it means to fall with grace.
I reflect also on the words of His Holiness the 17th Karmapa, Ogyen Trinley Dorje, who says:
“Once we realize that our personalities are not fixed and that we can decide to actively change them … compassion and other inner qualities … need to be cultivated gradually, over time, and in concert with other qualities.”
—from Interconnected: Embracing Life in Our Global Society
That insight speaks well to our seasons of transformation: change is not a wound but a slow unfolding. We do not lose something essential; rather, we permit ourselves to evolve.
Autumn teaches this lesson better than any sermon. The tree does not weep for the leaves it loses. It does not believe it has been diminished. It trusts the bare branches to hold through winter, trusts the sap still running quietly within, trusts that the emptying is part of a larger rhythm.
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As a Buddhist priest, Lama, and as a fellow human being, I find this trust—this willingness to release what we cannot keep—may be the deepest practice we can learn. To lean into the breaking point of a season, of a chapter in life, without turning away or clinging to what once was. To let the shedding be a blessing, not a defeat.
Letting Go with Grace
Dear reader, you might be standing somewhere in your own brytningstid. Perhaps it is not autumn outside your window, but you know the feeling: that subtle tilt of light in your life, the quiet suggestion that something is ready to be released.
You have known the weight of holding on. You have known the ache of things changing against your will. And yet, as you look more closely, perhaps you can sense that what feels like breaking is also an opening.
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May you, in this season or the next, listen for the wisdom in the falling leaves. May you see that change need not be feared as loss, that release can be its own kind of nourishment. The trees will stand through winter’s silence; so will you.
When the time comes, may you, too, fall with grace—and trust that the ground will receive you gently, ready to nourish what will rise again.
Yours through change,
Lama Chimey
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Lama Chimey 