Mary Rose O’Reilley, The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd

November 1, 2025

November’s arrival marks a slow transition, a quiet folding of the year’s exuberance into contemplation and stillness.

Mary Rose O'Reilley, in her book The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd, captures this subtle transformation through a lyrical memoir of walking through late-autumn woods. Her prose straddles reverence and keen observation, reflecting the mood of the first freeze, when nature settles into a quiet feast of being.

O'Reilley’s walk begins amid bare trees, frozen ponds, and the fading gestures of summer—scarlet sumac now past, bees ceased. Yet even here, in the seeming barrenness, she finds life’s pulses and artistry:

On the first day of November last year, sacred to many religious calendars but especially the Celtic, I went for a walk among bare oaks and birch. Nothing much was going on.

Scarlet sumac had passed, and the bees were dead. The pond had slicked overnight into that shiny and deceptive glaze of delusion, first ice. It made me remember skates and conjure a vision of myself skimming backward on one foot, the other extended; the arms become wings.

Minnesota girls know that this is not a difficult maneuver if one's limber and practices even a little after school before the boys claim the rink for hockey.

I think I can still do it - one thinks many foolish things when November's bright sun skips over the entrancing first freeze.

A flock of sparrows reels through the air looking more like a flying net than seventy conscious birds, a black veil thrown on the wind. When one sparrow dodges, the whole net swerves, dips: one mind. Am I part of anything like that?

Maybe not. [...]

It's an ugly woods, I was saying to myself, padding along a trail where other walkers had broken ground before me. And then I found an extraordinary bouquet.

Someone had bound an offering of dry seed pods, yew, lyme grass, red berries, and brown fern and laid it on the path: "nothing special," as Buddhists say, meaning "everything."

Gathered to formality, each dry stalk proclaimed a slant, an attitude, infinite shades of neutral.

All contemplative acts, silences, poems, honor the world this way. Brought together by the eye of love, a milkweed pod, a twig, allow us to see how things have been all along.

A feast of being.

― Mary Rose O'Reilley, The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd

O'Reilley’s reflections weave together spirituality and nature with unpretentious grace.

The “extraordinary bouquet” of simple, dry seeds and stalks becomes a symbol both for the season’s stillness and for awareness itself—the quiet focus that reveals the beauty hidden in everyday things. Her words remind us that November’s sparse landscape is not desolate, but richly alive for those who look through the lens of love and contemplation.

This piece beautifully reflects the Northern autumn’s light and temper, where the first ice and the last birds mingle in a dance of endings and beginnings.

O'Reilley’s “feast of being” invites us to join in this dance, to find that even a moment of quiet in cold woods offers connection and meaning.