To Live Close to the Bone

What fall teaches us about ourselves

November brings a bare bones season. Now in the north you can see the outline of everything: tree trunks, birds’ nests, brittle leaves clinging to branches. Neighbors’ houses reemerge, casting off summer’s green cloaks. Spindly trees stretch their fingers to the skies. Weeds shiver by the roadside. 

The only beauty that comes is brutal: streaks of sunlight through dark pewter clouds, fields laid bare and shorn after harvest, rain silvering tree branches with strings of glistening pearls. 

By its bareness and barrenness, autumn clears the way for future growth. Winter will whip in with wild winds and heaps of snow. Spring fades as a faint memory and a distant promise. First we have to stare at what is gone and reckon with what will be no more. Skeletons of lilac bushes. Tangled vines from harvested squash. Shrunken tomatoes that froze in October. Every garden dream must be plowed under to prepare for the next planting.

Autumn teaches us to live close to the bone. To stare hard into the branches, straight to the sky.

Close to the bone (phrase): telling the truth in an uncomfortable way.
Her words cut close to the bone.

A friend who entered a convent told me once how she loves this season for its starkness. You can see all the squirrels’ nests, all the branches on every tree, she told me. I like how fall strips everything down to its essentials. Religious life brings its own living close to the bone. Vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Choosing less than what the world deems worthy. 

Lately I’ve been thinking about how Jesus was poor. Not in a romantic way, but in a brutal way. He likely knew hunger, thread-bare clothing, and hard work for scarce pay. He lived close to the bone, like most humans who have ever lived. 

We cannot romanticize poverty; it is as deforming as wealth. Yet what do we do with the troubling truth that less was the side of the equation on which God chose to dwell: with the have-nots? What might be the consequences of our own opposite choices: the desire for comfort, ease, security, abundance—even enough?  

Cut to the bone (idiom): reduced to the lowest possible amount.
The family’s expenses had been cut to the bone.

Few things help me more as a writer than a good outline. The bare bones of the essay or book become the sturdy skeleton on which to hang muscle and ligament and skin. 

Flowery language and tendrils of trailing thoughts wind my words off course, but the bones bring me back: what is the heart of the matter? Write close to the bones, I tell myself. Trim the fat and feathers; find what truth emerges; only then can you go back and see what weak spots need more strength. 

Bones are light-weight but load-bearing. We hold that paradox within us. Tiny twigs are the same. Soon they will carry the weight of heavy snow but rarely break, only snapping in the fiercest storms or thickest ice. 

Keeping close to the bones means pressing toward truth and seeking the words to bear it. Any line I offer you is an experiment and an exercise in trust. Only a tender twig: is it strong enough to hold?

To the bone (idiom): deeply affected. We were chilled to the bone. 

When faced with a valley of brittle bones, dry and desolate, and a question from God that seems cruel on the surface—Mortal, can these bones live?—Ezekiel utters one weary line as response: God, only you know.

But we know something of this story, too. How dry bones are not the end. How spring returns after longest winter. How ashes can rise to glory. How the path to heaven winds through deserts and valleys.

Bare branches are the place of possibility. Next year’s buds are already on the trees, quiet and hidden. Bare-bones seasons hold life too, even when they feel hard or hollow.

One house in our neighborhood is fully decorated for Christmas. Inflatable snowmen waving to the street, neon trees blinking in rainbow hues, giant letters singing J-O-Y into the darkness. But what if we could live closer to the bones for a few weeks more, pressing into the paradoxical places, remembering the skeletal strength, finding the clearer view through the empty forest?

There is beauty in the bare and barren places, too. Not only for what they will become, but what they are today: witnesses of the essentials we need and nothing more. Only fall lets us see the fractals of trees in full glory: each twig a tiny replica of the whole, repeating patterns in smaller scales, rhythms reaching up and out in self-contained splendor. 

What a strange part of Genesis, I used to think—God casting deep sleep on the man, plucking out his rib, and creating the woman from one thin bone. Now I see the brilliance: how close to the bone is where we begin, how we are built from each other, how what is taken from us is not always grief but also a beginning.

The thin ribs of this empty season, too, may be the only bones we need for now.