Pablo Picasso once said, "Every act of creation is first an act of destruction."

I wonder, sometimes, whether there is some design behind the fact that God created light on the first day and waited until the third to create trees upon which to shine it. I have a hunch, nevertheless, that God's act of creation was carried out in autumn - just in time for Earth to die - so He could paint creation with His brightest brush.

Mother Nature dies this time each year, and the colors of her demise are always spectacular. Neither the most skilled playwright nor the most accomplished opera composer could conjure a death scene as gloriously dramatic, no matter what light is cast upon his players' stage.

And it is remarkable that Earth's death throes are made beautiful by appeal solely to one of our five senses. Earth dies in absolute silence, absent of any fragrance, taste, or touch.

I don't recall to whom this might be attributed, but it has been said that when we die, we each die alone. Watching Earth die in all her magnificence gives me a sense of holy solitude, a sense of completeness as a circle drawing back to its point of origin, a sense that something far greater than any man can comprehend is unfolding before me.

It's a sense of the Word becoming flesh.

And as I watch it today, all my senses overwhelmed by color, I can comprehend only one thing:

I am.

And that's all I need. The rest is gravy.

My new favorite song:

A year is a warm fuzzy measurement of time for us. We measure our age in years. We celebrate birthdays and anniversaries on the same day each year. When the number of years which have lapsed since we were deemed fully educated by some school somewhere are evenly divisible by five or ten, we get back together with the people who received their diplomas at the same time and make snide remarks about the ones who've gotten fat.

Somehow, we've grown sentimental about Earth being in exactly the same place in relation to the sun as it was at the time some memorable event in the past took place. On my daughter's birthday this year, for example, I happened to look at my watch at exactly the same time as the time she was born, and I thought, "Eight years ago at this exact minute, I was watching her be born." I was wrong, though, and I knew better.

Here's the stupid thing, the thing we forget. A year isn't really 365 days.

In reality, it takes the Earth 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes, and 9.54 seconds - what's called a "sidereal year" - to make one complete trip around the sun.

The problem is that a sidereal year isn't evenly divisible by 24 hours. Earth's spin on its axis is about one-quarter turn away from true each year to be completely synchronous with one complete orbit of the sun. And that sucks if you're trying to create an accurate calendar that's useful to the common man.

So, we did what we humans do best when we can't figure something out. We fudged it.

The calendar we use today was first devised by an Italian named Aloysius Lilius. He came up with the idea of basing the calendar on daily rotations of the Earth, and then fudged it by declaring that an extra day should be stuck in there every four years to make up for the difference.

It made enough sense to the head guy in charge at the time, the Pope, that it became official. Of course, the Pope, being the head guy in charge, also decided that he'd name it after himself instead of the guy who thought it up, so it's now known as the Gregorian Calendar, after Pope Gregory XIII. Pissed at having someone take credit for his work, Lilius then proposed that they should stick an extra Pope in after every IV popes to make the Catholic church make sense, but that didn't fly.

I just made that last bit up.

So why in the world would I pick today to write a post like this?

It's sentimentality time, for me. Exactly one sidereal year before I started writing this - the last time the Earth was in this exact position in relation to the sun - I was climbing in my car for the ten hour drive to be with my brother, who had just been diagnosed with the cancer which would ultimately claim his life.

Rough day, here.

I hate it when I play inadvertent practical jokes on myself. The perils of an aging memory makes it happen more and more often.

I have a small magnetic whiteboard on my refrigerator. I use it for my To Do List and I update it every evening with the things I want to accomplish the next day. Unfortunately, the board is small enough that I tend to use abbreviations and shorthand to preserve space.

Occasionally, it backfires, as it did today. I have no idea what "Call Tony Re: Fzr Ins Hamp" is supposed to mean. If it weren't written in my own handwriting, I'd swear someone broke into Chez Fool and vandalized my To Do List. And to make it even weirder, I only know two people named Tony. One is a veterinarian and the other is a guy with whom I used to play golf.

The only critter residing at Chez Fool (besides me), is my healthy fish, Gilbert Short For Gill (his official name as given by my daughter), and the other Tony cheats too much at golf for my taste. I have no idea why I'd need to call either. Or why I'd need to contact either about Fzr Ins Hamp.

I certainly hope that Fzr Ins Hamp isn't something that needs to be hooked up to someone's life support system, needs to be installed on someone's car to keep the brakes from failing, or might be instrumental to averting nuclear war.

And I hope that this Tony, whoever he might be, didn't need a reminder about Fzr Ins Hamp and took care of it himself.

According to folk wisdom, the first thing one should do when one falls off a horse is to climb back on.

A few weeks ago, some friends - a husband and wife - had the rug yanked from beneath their lives. Matt, the husband, left their house to go somewhere and forgot that he was supposed to take out the garbage on the way out of their house. Sarah, his wife, did it instead.

Their home has a detached garage behind which the garbage cans live. When Sarah walked behind the garage with the garbage bag, she was attacked by someone lurking in the woods behind their house.

No one is quite sure what her assailant's weapon was, but it was likely a baseball bat. She was struck on the side of the head, breaking her orbital bone and damaging her eye. Her attacker then dragged her into the woods, where he apparently intended to rape her.

Sarah remembers nothing from the attack except one thing...her mother always told her that if she ended up needing to defend herself from a male attacker, she should use her knees. This she did, and it apparently worked.

She vaguely remembers waking up in the woods and wandering back to her house, where she called 911. They rushed her off to the local hospital. Thankfully, aside from the damaged eye, none of her other injuries were serious. The eye, however, needed the attention of a specialist, so she was airlifted to a hospital better equipped to handle the situation.

There are apparently only a handful of surgeons in the nation who can do the surgery they needed, and as luck would have it, one was on staff at the second hospital. She was rushed into surgery and after several hours, emerged with a little hope that her eyesight would recover.

After she was released from the hospital several days later, she was in church with Matt when she suddenly started getting dizzy and complained of a severe headache. She got up to leave the service and collapsed.

They carted her off to the hospital again, where they discovered that she'd suffered some bleeding behind her eye. After a few more hours in surgery, the news was not good. The bleeding had done so much damage to her optic nerve that there was no chance she'd ever regain sight in that eye.

Matt and Sarah are strong people, each with a tremendous sense of humor and a lot of faith in God. There was never any question that they'd be fine in the aftermath of all this, no matter what the outcome. What happens happens, and they both know that there's nothing left but to meet the challenge and move on.

On Saturday night, they held a Halloween party, and their guests were all asked to wear pirate costumes. Eye patches were handed out at the door.

That horse has a rider again.