The Lingering Season

This lingering autumn season endures, despite early hints of winter.  I recently took an afternoon walk and was surprised at how rapidly evening came on.

I love the luxuriant leaves in high summer, green and whispering in the breeze.  I love them too in the earlier fall, alive with yellows and oranges and reds.  But there's beauty in the barrenness, too.  Bare branches are revealing.  You see the landscape and the skies and the shapes of the trees.

This might be the single most photographed tree on this blog.  I've taken pictures of it in every season of the year, and indeed in every season of my own life.  It speaks stability and power.

Here's the same beautiful tree from another angle.  Do you see what I see here?  I don't even know what kind of tree it is, but I admire it so greatly.  Its independence, its uniqueness, its dissimilarity to all its neighbors, its strong, shapely branches, its imaginative contours.  

There's so much wisdom in trees.  A tree never strays from the spot where it’s planted.  But in that spot, it digs deep and reaches high.  However steep the terrain, however rocky the soil, a tree will make the best of its place in the world, sending its roots far and wide to probe the earth for all it needs to live.  It deploys strong branches up into the air and grasps nutrition from the light and air itself.  Then it takes the sparse harvest of air, and earth, and water and transforms them into the pleasures of table: pears and mangoes, walnuts and coconuts, coffee and tea.  When the season of change is upon it, the tree does not cling, but allows its leaves to drift gently to the earth, where they become soil to sustain the tree’s life again.  It wastes nothing.  A tree is forever aiming for the future, sending its seeds out into the world and recreating itself in its own shade.