We’re well into autumn, and our world is turning a whole new kind of technicolour.

Leaves that amazed us with their delicacy when they emerged from bare twigs back in the spring, and that have filtered sunlight and offered us welcome shade through the summer, are now turning the treescapes into bright tapestries.

I walked my small (five-year-old) grandson up the footpath to his brother’s school at hometime recently. He was doing that obligatory autumn thing of pushing his feet through fallen beech leaves (do we teach them that, or is it just one of nature’s ritual obligations, like jumping in puddles, that we’re born with?). I said something like, “We’re walking on a golden pavement.”

“It’s not golden,” he said – such prosiness from someone who’s wearing his shoes out making golden waves. He’ll grow out of it.

My morning dog walk takes me along a short stretch of the Tilmore Brook. There are trees, and for a space they overarch the road from each side, making a tunnel that’s mostly laurel – so dark and shady, and getting more so as the days shorten. The path meets the road again and bends, and the evergreen gives way to the deciduous, and the light changes.

Here, at this time of year, the world is suddenly, fabulously, illuminated in bright, vivid, yellow (yes) gold – the sunshine gold of a maple that arches over the path, lighting it from above and below with the wonder of fabulous decay.

We are all moving, walking, driving, riding through a created world which is joyously manifesting another ending. We creatures, too, have our rhythms that we cannot be unaware of, however much we might want to ignore or defy them.

We, like the leaves, emerge in amazing delicacy from our mothers’ wombs and move through light and shade towards an ending. Let’s not lose the joy to be had in puddles and leaf-waves and rainbows; let’s mine the gold, and share it.