The One Yellow Leaf

On holding joy and sadness at the same time

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tell me, how can this

way hold joy and sadness with

the change of her breath?

it’s the one yellow leaf that

strikes me with joyful-sadness

— from “(fiery melancholy)”

In summer, the old way through the woods is a green tunnel. The canopy is dense, and Nature seems to welcome anyone who walks beneath her. I think of it as a loving embrace. Then autumn arrives and covers the same path with a stream of fallen leaves, fiery reds and yellows that look like an eternal lament.

The path is the same, but it does not feel the same. What puzzled me was that I could not say whether I felt happy or sad. Both feelings arrived together, and for a long time I assumed that meant something was wrong with me.

The leaf that stopped me

What finally put a name to it was a single yellow leaf. It was not the brightest or the largest, just one leaf among thousands, catching the light. Seeing it, I felt joy at its color and sadness at what its color meant. I wrote “joyful-sadness” because I had no better word, and I still do not.

I had been asking the woods the wrong question. I kept asking which feeling was correct. The woods were showing me that the question was mistaken. The same scene can hold both, and neither cancels the other.

Why we hurry to pick one

Most of us are uncomfortable with mixed feelings. We want a clear label for the day: good, bad, fine, struggling. When two emotions arrive together, we assume one of them is intruding, and we try to push it out. We tell ourselves that we should only be grateful, or that we have no right to be sad.

But many of the moments that matter most are mixed. A child leaves for school. A career ends and another begins. A parent, a place or a season fades while we are still loving it. If we only allow ourselves one feeling at a time, we flatten what is actually happening.

What the woods keep showing me

When I go to the woods, I go to observe the way things are, sometimes with joy and other times with sadness. The woods does not ask me to choose. Nature shapes them from this to that, sometimes with slow, loving care and other times with immense force. Both are the same woods. Over time, I learned to let that be true of my own days.

Naming both feelings made them easier to carry. When I let the sadness sit next to the joy, neither one grew out of proportion. The sadness did not turn into despair, and the joy did not turn into denial.

I haven’t mastered holding joy and sadness together. Some days the two still pull against each other, and I am still learning, on the Way, to let them stand side by side.

An invitation to try

The next time you feel two things at once, try describing both without ranking them. Complete the sentence, “I feel ______ and ______ at the same time.” Then look for one small, specific thing that holds them together for you, like my yellow leaf. It might be a photograph, a song, an empty chair, or a particular kind of light.

You do not need to fix it or explain it. Notice it, give it a name, and let it be as complicated as it is.

A question to sit with

What am I feeling right now that I have been trying to talk myself out of? Perhaps the answer is already standing at the edge of the path, bright and small, waiting for me to look.

Next: What a rock dam taught me about obstacles.