Leaves aren’t the only things turning. Male goldfinches look tattered with pale green showing through the gold. Warblers dart among winter residents in cryptic fall plumage, no longer singing boastful songs.

This is a time of metamorphosis. Alchemy weaves through the fabric of life. Forms change and colors shift. But modern technological societies regulate this alchemy. Birth and death, the most personal changes of all, are supposed to occur in hospitals out of sight. Smaller transformations take place in factories, laboratories, and giant farms. Much of the time people manipulate virtual objects, or at least human generated ones, rather than create from scratch.

So I try to dabble with natural forces. I cook and bake with whole ingredients. Soon we’ll fire up the woodstove, our only method of heating the house aside from leaving the oven open after the bread comes out. If there is a more human activity than taming fire, we have yet to find the archaeological evidence for it. Even using matches, we need to coax the flames as they grow and shrink along their path from newspapers to sticks to hunks of (hopefully) dry and cracked wood. I love our cast iron poker, which is simply yet ingeniously designed with a pointy end and hook that facilitate pulling and prodding logs into place.

The most important thing about working with natural forces is that the result is collaboration. We adapt our expectations and keep our mind nimble. The garden this time of year is a good illustration. Some plants never sprouted, or like the beans were grazed by slugs and rabbits until they grew stunted. Cabbage planted too late in the spring is making heads in the fall weather behind a backdrop of goldenrods.