Yellow Leaves Are Dying

There is a tree outside my window, reaching and twisting outward like a sentinel of the sky.  It's branches bow humbly in the autumn wind as melancholy clouds fight a battle of mourning with the sun.  The air is impregnated with winter, heavy with chill like a bough laden with snow, casting grey shadows amongst grey light.  The world is blanketed in the cold, drizzling consequences of this spinning, hurtling world.
And yet this tree outside my window is exploding, the torch of nature has set alight its leaves and they burn an ecstatic yellow.  The wind, in sweeping torrents of impish playfulness, scatters the flame.  The leaves cover the ground, collecting in forgotten concrete corners and transforming the mundane sidewalk into a dance of exquisite ferocity, a duet of gust and color.  The leaves stick to the shoes of passersby in drab raincoats and black umbrellas, for brief moments letting them walk in the midst of swirling yellow and rain.
It is a beautiful gift, this tree, as leaves detach like scattered pigeons and ascend and descend upon the fancies of the icy breeze, filling the atmosphere and carpeting the earth with a kingly array.  And yet, of course, comes of the great fact of autumn, the great metaphor as it were.
Everything is dying.
And even as the wind and the tree laugh, the wind snatches away those ecstatic yellow leaves and once they depart they do not return, and the tree is naked for a season.  A shade of yellow like this will never be seen again, once it is blown it is blown.  Soon there will be no more joyful, trumpet-like color to dance around the faded world.
I feel a resonance with this tree.  It gives such a fleeting beauty to the world, shedding its skin to cover and tend a brief area of this enormously brutal world, as I attempt to shed my soul to try and sway the apathetic darkness that closes in around me.  I am synonymous with this tree, as perhaps we all are.  Whether through words, or actions, small gestures or large shouts, we are all trying to spread ourselves throughout the world.  And most, like this tree, are shedding their fantastical souls of yellow and gold to simply try and set the world ablaze again with dance.
But are we, like this tree, dying?
Yes, we are.
And we will never get our old sense of beauty back.  Like this tree, once the leaves are gone they are gone forever, scattered and shriveled.  The winter comes and blankets the tree's gentle nakedness in snow, but the beauty the tree itself produced has been quelled.
But then comes the buds of spring, the sun-streaked summer, and again scattering of beauty.  It is the cycle of nature that we've all know since childhood.
If you are clutching at parts yourself that are fading, that are dying and scattering themselves, if you feel like you're pouring yourself into the world and soon you will be empty, let it all go.  It was always meant to go.  It is the seasons of the soul.  Empty yourself and you may be barren for a time, with only cold bleak pessimism to cover yourself with, but it will not last.  Just as there are parts of you that are not meant to last, so bleakness will not last, but just as things will always grow anew, so the winter will always come again.  But there is beauty in the winter, too.
The yellow leaves are dying, but the tree is not.  Not yet.  And it still has so much more ecstasy to give, with golden leaves to come.
It's okay to let parts of you die, to give irreplaceable to beauty the world, to a friend, to a stranger.  The world is a cycle.  The soul is a cycle.  It's all an intricate, swirling, incomprehensible and gorgeous cycle.
The leaves fall, they give, they die, and new leaves will burst forth with a remembrance of what has fallen to give them life.
Because nature's first green is gold.