Butterflies are flying.  I have set the irrigation lines and I’m now heading to turn on the irrigation pump.  I notice small white and orange butterflies, of to my left, as I drive the four-wheeler along the eastern edge of the hayfield.  I’m hurried and intend to kept driving.  Sometimes nature gets the better of reason and I stop and turn off the four-wheeler.  Walking a few steps into the hayfield I sit.  These moments always matter, but I find it hard to settle-in when I feel something needs doing.  Life is blessed when I remember simple truth…I have all day.  Sometimes in the all of day there is elegance in silent attendance.

Butterflies and bees all around.  Soon I settle.  I have not the calm of the meandering butterfly, but I’ve slowed enough to remember what I am experiencing in the hayfield does not happen often.  A few weeks earlier family decided not to harvest and bale hay from this field.  Rather, the plants were left to fend for themselves.  The rye, fescue, clover, and the many “weeds” would have the fall to be themselves, without human intervention—other than my watering the field.  In the moment, the relationship seems more than fair.  A little watering and I, in return, have the enjoyment of life—soil, plants, and animals—twined with mine.

Come the end of season, after the late fall freezes, and when plants have gone dormant, cows will be turned out into this hayfield.  By then the grasses will have settled their sugar and protein into the crown and roots and settled-in for the winter—a time of ease.  I’ll no longer need to water and instead of hand-feeding the animals will fend for themselves in this field.  In the late of fall lives become more natural.  Plants and animals live as created.  We too, as humans can live as created if we only live the season and accept lighter workloads as normal in the cool of year.  Best of all, the season it is quieter.  Harvest is over and the swathers, tractors, balers are stored for the winter.  The quieter time serves all of creation well for we’re no longer using petroleum and creating exhaust.  From this time until first snow, harvest is only done by natural bovine tongue.

Until then and in the now, as grasses bend toward ground and dandelion leaves reach greatness—up to three inches in breadth and six inches in length, alfalfa is the celebrity.  Full of life and standing upright their purple flowers are full.  Gracing stems by the thousands.  Such abundance of beauty and fragrance and it is all free.  Alfalfa teaches us in this season.  Look to your creation, know your interior and how you can express it naturally without fear and release yourself.  In the abundance of your bloom and fragrance, the butterflies, flies, bees and humans are sure to hold wonder in your sight and smell.

We have never been alone in our living.  Creation’s grace is life is lived within life.  Our soul did not begin with human birth but with the beginning.  “Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love,” wrote Rumi, “It will not lead you astray.”  It is hard to remember what we really love it a society where structure and profit, power, and prestige are honored.  So, listen to the silent and open yourself to the strange—those ideas, feelings, wonderings you’ve been taught to think of as meaningless.  There in the meaningless is the profound of our soul and it smells like alfalfa flowers and moves like butterflies.