“Our appointment with life is in the present moment,” writes Thich Nhat Hanh in Peace Is Every Step. My appointment with life is in the present moment. Even saying these words slows down the moment and magnifies it. This can be a challenge as the days speed up and we think too much and too quickly of tomorrow or back to yesterday, without seeing what is around us today.

In the daily world of many in North America, late August and September bring a busy, surely speeded-up time, as people return from vacations, head back to school, start on new deadlines, and plan ahead and do many things in anticipation of autumn and winter. But nature has its own rhythm, in a summing up of the summer, with fields, parks, and roadsides full of bursting flowers and fruits.

While we may walk different streets and pathways in the years of our lives, always the seasons make their turn, in their own timeless ways. In the Northeast United States, nature is at a time of pause and unhurried movement toward the turn of the seasons. The nights are cooler, a harbinger of what is to come. In the far north, leaves have begun to change colors. In the Mid-Atlantic, though some leaves and plants are changing colors, the trees and flowers are still lush. A green canopy remains above and around us, soothing and clear in the crisp September air.

We humans have a tendency to look forward, and many eagerly anticipate the changes of green over to yellow, russet, gold, and orange that will set the hillsides, mountaintops, and city parks ablaze. The trees, the signposts of the passage of seasons, have been preparing for the colder months. As the temperatures cool, daylight shortens, and other weather changes take place, the trees hoard and store the nutrients that will, following the cold winter months, enable the next spring’s awakening.

Still Blooming

This preparation has been taking place invisible to us, a natural world getting ready for the colder seasons in the north. Yet around us are the still-bountiful sights and smells of the remaining days of summer. Late August and September provide their own abundant display of pinks and purples in the wildflowers, especially the asters. A late-summer blanket of varied shades of green and many hues, bright in the vibrant sunlight, mark this culmination of the season, before the autumnal colors command our attention, the leaves drop, and ultimately the bare browns and grays of branches become silhouetted against the winter skies. It is, after all, early September. Take notice of the green and the showy pinks, whites, yellows, and purples before the palette changes over to autumn. This is lovely late summer, with its finery still worthy of notice, saying to us, “there’s no rush.”

A milky-white beauty

The sunflower family’s gaillardia, known as blanket flowers, in a field

Sunlight reveals the veins of a leaf in Battery Park City.

September green along the Shawangunk Ridge

Deep pink and green along a country road

The full fruit of late summer

A glowing sun on grapevines growing wild

Green on the front of a Wall Street building

Grasses on the Battery Park City Esplanade

Tiny flowers in the grass at the Irish Hunger Memorial in Manhattan

Goldenrod are a fitting prelude to the golds and yellows of autumn.

Just as some flowers recede in late summer, asters make a splash.

View the slide show larger in Flickr.