He missed the green. The fallen leaves needed to be done away with if the street, the park, and the forest were ever to return to their original form. Yet the rules of the place—the rules he had, through his ceaseless building and bettering, set into being—stated that fallen leaves did not move. For a long stretch of days and nights he brooded over this problem, and it occurred to him that all of his efforts might have gone for naught and that he might ought to let it all come apart into chaos again, and begin anew, or else abandon his foolish efforts to bring forth fixed and pleasurable things out of the dead terror of the chaos.

One day, though, he noted a leaf that appeared different from the others, being of a darker color, and no longer flat but curled up at the tips and wrinkled in the middle. It was not as beautiful as the red leaves around it, yet something in it struck him as new and important to the problem that had been troubling him. He watched that leaf over days as it grew darker and darker and curled in upon itself.

Then, one day after it had become nearly unrecognizable, he noticed that it had moved. He gazed at it in fascination, for he had long ago laid down the law that leaves did not move once fallen. After a long while, it moved again, as of its own volition. It did not disappear in one place and reappear in another, but lifted itself up from the pond of red leaves, moved across space, and settled down again, sometimes lighting at a different angle. It moved again and again and finally took to the air and whirled away and was gone.

So there was a way of getting rid of fallen leaves, but it required that they lose their beauty and be allowed to move about. Having labored for so many eons to create the beauty of the park and the street, he was fearful of letting all the leaves go. He had learned though to trust that sense of correctness that had guided him to this point. Ignoring it led, sometimes quickly and sometimes over slow eons, first to troubling emotions and then to the steady and relentless decoherence of all that he had so laboriously summoned into his regard. Obeying it—though it didn’t always lead to results quickly, or at all—more often than not made things better than they had been. And things that were better persisted and self-improved. Things that were shoddy frayed, sometimes while he wasn’t looking, other times even as he gazed on helplessly watching them dissolve into chaos.