I just gave a talk on Wednesday night at Fairlawn United Church for their adult education Speakers Series. The topic was :The Origins of Spirituality. and we presented both the hard western science story that takes us back almost 20 billion years to the great mystery of how the billions and billions and billions of stars and planets and life all came to be. It was my task to tell the old stories, the kinds of questions that humans a million years ago would have asked as they migrated out of Africa and pondered the power of the world and universe that surrounded them.

The Church committee asked me to close the evening with this story about why the leaves change colour in the fall. They felt it honoured our human quest for knowledge from both the ancient wisdoms and the modern sciences that try to explain who we are, and from where we came, and to where we might be going. Being an oral storyteller, I had breathed in the story years ago and unfortunately had no written copy.

So late last night, and early this morning – on requests from both the congregation, old teacher colleagues that I met that night in the audience, and a former student who was in need of a really good story – I wrote it down for the first time. I give you all the gift of

Grandfather and the Teacher – you’ll find it in the story section of my blog.

Now, I have to go and play in the leaves…