001_TO HAVE FAITH IN FALLING
01.09.2026
WORDS & PHOTOS BY KIMI ZOET
To Have Faith in Falling
What does that mean to you?
What feelings arise when you read those words on this page?
Does it fill you with courage? Hope? Does it give you a feeling that you can let go - that someone, or something, will be there to hold you up?
Or does it reveal a lack of trust? A fear that when you surrender, there might be nothing there to support you?
When I experience autumn, I think about this a lot.
I look at the trees in London, at the golden crunch beneath my boots sinking into the muddy grass of the parks.
“Lucky you,” I might think.
You know what you’re doing.
There’s something so graceful about the conclusion of a leaf’s life. No wrestling. No questioning. Just a kind of surrender.
A quiet faith in letting go.
But why does a leaf seem to know this?
Why does it seem to know that its departure isn’t the end?
Perhaps because it knows that it belongs to something larger than itself.
The leaf is not an isolated thing. It is part of the tree, the soil, the insects, the seasons. When it leaves the tree, it doesn’t disappear from the system. It simply changes form within it.
It creates fertile soil for insects. It feeds the earth. It might, in time, help another tree grow.
And I wonder whether this is what faith has always tried to give us: a sense that we belong to something larger than ourselves. Perhaps this is what we’ve become so removed from.
Not necessarily religion itself, but the feeling of belonging to something beyond our individual lives.
So much of modern life asks us to carry ourselves. To know ourselves. To build ourselves. To pick ourselves up when things go wrong.
And, of course, we have one another. We have friends, family, people who love us. But perhaps we sometimes ask those people to carry a weight that used to belong, at least partly, to faith - the weight of uncertainty, of loss, of mortality, of not knowing what comes next.
Maybe this is why the idea of falling can feel so frightening. If we don’t trust that we belong to anything larger than ourselves, then letting go can feel like disappearing. But the leaf seems to know otherwise. It seems to know that endings make way for beginnings.
That nothing really exists in isolation.
That an ending can be regenerative.
And whether we speak about something as enormous as death, or as small as the end of a meal, there is always the possibility of something beginning again.
So maybe to have faith in falling is not necessarily to believe that someone will catch you.
Perhaps it is to trust that even when you are no longer where you once were, you still belong to something.
That the marks we leave behind are not always ours to see.
That our endings might become beginnings for someone else.
And perhaps that is enough.
