How to Pay Attention This Week

The shifting of the color of the leaves and how it creates space for us to listen and learn

Friday evening, I sat on the porch and soaked up the depth of the Harvest Moon as it shone like the sun on my face at 9 p.m. I howled to let out the last breaths of summer to the moon and be reminded that I am nothing more than an animal myself. This instinct is one we rarely allow ourselves to soak up, act upon, and then revel in the feelings it invokes in our bodies and hearts.

I have learned over the years the importance of revealing who we are, not as much to other humans but most of all to ourselves. Being our truest self takes immense vulnerability. So much so that it can rarely happen. We live behind layers that hide our colors. These layers can also shut us off from embracing who we are. In fact, we can live an entire life, never allowing ourselves to be willing to see, explore, and meander through the layers of ourselves. I refuse to do that in life because I have learned as I age that there are daily choices we make to hear ourselves more and ones we decide the opposite. I set out to spend more time digging than avoiding.

The trees this time of year offer us a beautiful thing. Something people travel from all around to observe. There are forecasts created to predict when the colors of the maples, beeches, birches, oaks, and more will be at their peak. Our entire landscape in the northern parts of the world shifts to reveal the true colors of the trees we believe uniformly are green for about six months of the year. To understand the process of the trees going from green leaves to color and then once again to their skeletal shapes that will hold the outlines of fallen snow in the months ahead is only to tap the surface of what lessons lie beneath the colorful world they are about to paint for us.

As a northerner, I have always loved this time of year, and it is enough just to find it enchanting and marvelous in its beauty, but the more I walked beside the trees and observed them, the more I realized this moment is a critical teaching for us humans. They are imparting wisdom we could spend a lifetime unraveling.

In this decade of self-acceptance and self-love I have been undergoing in my 30s, I have learned to watch the trees and what a gift it is to embrace our own truths and colors hidden in phases we need to perform and embrace the status quo. I have learned that these colors tell a story of not just who we are but the journey it has taken to arrive right here and how unique this story is in our growth.

Many of you know we have a maple on our land I have tracked over the years. Every year, she holds a new shade of color depending on the rain, heat, and more she underwent. She holds the hill she sits on in place, and every year, I know her moment she shines the brightest. I refuse to miss her moment of glory when she reveals her entire year to us. It’s magic, and I will give that full essay this month with some updated reflections. Nonetheless, this tree has offered me the space to embrace the story and desires I hold in myself, too. These vulnerable parts of me, which I feel may not be worth showing, aren’t just worthy but maybe what the world and people who love me need most. Watching and paying attention to the leaves has offered me many ways to be more intentional about myself and the way I honor the realest parts of who I am.

Though some of us do not have trees that do this, we have gardens that will fade and shift into autumn or winter gardens that grow immensely different things. Plants will undergo their own changes, and these offer extremely similar truths and lessons we can pay attention to.

On this Monday, let me share just how, why, and more to pay attention to the shifting leaves around us, whether you are in the epicenter of fall color tours or just watching as the plants slowly downshift into a different phase of their life.

Below, you will find a guide to what, how, and why to pay attention to this week of Autumn.