When the leaves turn at first frost—a tide of gold and crimson rolling vertically down the continent, skipping over lake and desert and pencil sketched swaths of prairie and evergreen on it’s march to the sea—this is a collective event.
When a leaf falls to the ground, this is an individual event.
When something important is lost, we notice it first individually via unnumbered tiny heartaches—via inadmissible regrets and hoarded shame and stifled grief. To each, our personal catastrophe. Then, eventually, we look up and see the open sky through glistening branches and we recognize the onset of winter.
One cannot redress a collective loss without reference to the collective. That thing that was said that cannot be unsaid—on the back stair as she leaned against the parapet, flat as a vanilla envelope mailed and posted to some far off destination—that has been said before and before.
One cannot trust alone or unilaterally. Unilateral trust is a kind of violence. For this reason, trust belongs to the collective. We nurse it in the garden of childhood and exercise it at every turn. But like so much else trust also is a finite resource. When the rivers run dry we stand guard by the cisterns. We are vigilant. We write blog posts about how to love without risking love. How to win at the game, at any game. How to breathe without ingesting polluted air.
Then we look up and see an open sky criss-crossed by defoliate limbs and we recognize the onset of winter.