The Mystery of Trees

There is empty space between us.

I want to think that it sounds like waves crashing but I have a feeling that it’s just white noise of separate worlds across the sea.  It is a void of shared beginnings growing in two separate directions and I do not know if they are the same.  

I think about growth and all its beauty. 

I think about change and the ugliness it can entail.

And I wonder if they are the same things.

The plantling is sprouting leaves it doesn’t think it has, in directions it doesn’t know exists.  Its roots will always be grounded to the earth - it is what keeps it alive, thriving from the nutrients and water from the soil.  But when the seasons change, it needs to shed its leaves, as beautiful as they were in the summer.  But just before it falls in fall, it dances its most amazing fiery dance in the most surreal colours of blazing orange-yellow-red, stroking the blue sky in the wind - it is at its most beautiful.  Even as the leaves find its next home on green-brown ground at the foot of the tree, it realises that it has returned to the very roots it first came from.  Whether it is raked away by those trusty but sometimes scary metal fingers or left to disintegrate back into the rich earth, it looks above, to see the branches that once held it.  Sometimes, the wind blows and the branches sway its sturdy sway and waves its scaly arms, “hello again” or “goodbye” - sometimes, you are never sure which.  

Those darker, greyer skies of winter scare me a little when the branches look like they are dying or dead, and that maybe it wasn’t a good idea that it had no leaves in the abominable snow.  But the warmth of the yellow sun creeps up and the faint hue of the rainbow emerges just before I give up. And they remind me that trees grow, seasons change, leaves sprout, and we are designed for these changing seasons.  If we started off in places with only one season, we can move and the nature of the world may not move with us.  But we learn, we shed, we grow, we sprout, and we keep growing, even if we thought we were not made for it.  I don’t know if we get the same leaves next time but I know that we cannot hold on to the same ones forever.  And maybe that is just the beauty and ugliness of change: discovering vibrant colors you didn’t know existed and learning to let go when seasons change.  Because as much as the sky turns grey-blue-orange and the world gets cold-warm-hot-cool, my roots are still the same, continuing to reap from the nutrients and water the soil brings, from whichever corner of the earth.