(This is the first of a series of three articles written by Woodbury resident Michael Givant.)

Walking alone on the Greenbelt Trail during peak fall foliage is the ultimate spiritual freedom. The spectacular beauty of autumn's annual pageant has no rival in nature. I relish being in the midst of nature's fall sanctuary with only the sound of a chirping bird, the cold breeze on my face and watching a leaf blow in the wind.

Leaves are everywhere; their form, color, and where they fall are photographs waiting to be taken. There are trees covered with leaves that are ripe for the artist's canvas and some whose bark looks as if it were honed by a woodcarver's blade in this outdoor art museum.

Deep in the woods, there is a long canopy of leaves, many reds, and yellows with some green. It is like the entrance to a cathedral. The leaf carpet is almost a mirror image of the awning above. You cannot walk here without, literally and figuratively, being touched by the foliage. The effect is an awed quiet, a reminder of the old adage that life's great moments are faced in silence. It is how appreciative spectators go through a great art museum.

Look up and watch a leaf falling to the ground, one of millions that will follow it in the weeks ahead. It starts its descent like an elusive paper airplane and completes it, landing with a graceful approach to runway earth. Some leaves come down making loops, like the toy spaceships in the black-and-white 1930s serial Flash Gordon. Sometimes leaves the size of small birds seem to fly to earth or land on a limb just like real ones; it's sometimes hard to tell the difference.

This kaleidoscope of colors starts with a single green leaf that begins to shrivel developing yellow and brown spots. The foliage changes from green to yellow to red or rust to tan and finally brown; left to hang, like thin strips of charred metal before falling to the earth. What you can't see or hear is the great silent clock ticking. Never stopping, it alters leaves today, which will be different tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

Leaves fall into and on everything. In the hollow of an old tree is a single, red, yellow and green leaf. An edge is partially folded, like a page in a bankbook; nature's tri-color passbook with interest. A single red leaf and a tan one lay like crossed swords on a thin branch of a fallen tree. Some brown leaves are tucked between tree and vine. How long before they fall? Up on Cemetery Ridge, my name for a long, steep spine of woods that isn't really a part of the Greenbelt Trail, there is a small cemetery that dates from the 18th century. Here a few leaves lie neatly tucked on flat tombstones, as one would put an annual remembrance.

It often snows leaves in the woods this time of year. The breeze picks up and there's a sudden snow-like shower of small twirling yellow leaves. My face is chilled, a feeling reminiscent of a child playing outside, lost in the moment. Later the sun comes out and another sudden breeze causes big leaves to fall like the first flakes in a snowstorm. As the breeze picks up smaller yellow leaves come down hitting me on the shoulder and back as white flakes would. Soon red, rust and brown leaves come down as well. I take off my hat and one falls into it. Nice catch. The sun highlights an enormous tree whose leaves are unreal in their redness. A long stream of yellow leaves on a thin branch waves like a kite tail in the breeze.

One tree, whose leaves are between yellow and orange, is a surreal moment frozen in time. Redder than red leaves on a thin sprig illuminated in the light looking as if they were unattached, just suspended in mid air. Some small pointed leaves that vary from very light red to a brown red with greens of every shade and yellows of the full spectrum so oddly still and beautiful. Are they there to say something that I cannot hear, in the silence of the great ticking clock? Or perhaps I'm jaded, museumed out, after days of seeing the spectacular.

After the peak, some leaves are killed by frost. I touch them thinking that they will be moist but they are as dry as tea leaves. Not far away, yellow leaves dot the landscape of rust leaves, dead and green vines like a celebration of daisies on a summer's day. On one of the rare mornings that I don't walk, I find a dark somber beauty while riding the parkway. On the roadside, fog heightens and dramatizes, vibrant yellow leaves covering trees, which hang silently in the early stillness. There is a kind of sweet sadness to them. Sweet in that the colors are still vibrant, sad in that near them on other trees are brown leaves. If this were a painting it would be called still life outdoors.

When the foliage's blaze of colors turns to embers, I realize that leaves, like one-night stands, come and go. The soon-to-be bare trees, like spouses, live for decades and have a story to tell. That's when I stopped passing them and started looking closely at them and heard them silently whisper an alluring promise.