Shedding The Old

The trees shed their old selves so easily... even if it isn't as easy for us, what does it teach us?

The leaves are no longer subtly changing but are rapidly shifting overnight sometimes. This week, I noticed a Birch standing out in a blazing neon yellow among the pines. Shining like a beacon in the early morning light that paints the sky pale pinks and lavenders before going blue. What a gift she is, shining there in all her beauty and not asking for permission other than just to be herself in a world that is steps behind her. I find her energy brave and exciting, but I am also relatively saddened to know she won’t shine again like this for another year.

All of my 36 years of life, the trees have always spoken to me. The way moss grows under their trunks and how the snow recedes from them when their energy shifts in the spring. How they crack and shake in the winter winds over me when I ski or hold the snow heavy on their branches as if they desire to be tucked in and hold me beneath their cover. Ever since childhood, I have felt most at home amongst the woods, and maybe that is why they connect with me so deeply now in this season year after year. I feel so deeply sensitive watching them shift colors. It leaves me reflective of myself and all the ways I am growing, shifting, changing, and becoming.

They constantly teach me something, reminding me how to reshape myself and become in new ways. Their quiet wisdom has always spoken to me loudest. I remember after I had my daughter, feeling this deep longing every night in sweaty hormonal dreams of a pine that wanted me to come to it. It happened for weeks in that tender, liminal, yet receptive state I was deep within as I healed and passed through that chapter of life. This dream would emerge over and over in the same way, leaving me feeling held and seen. One cool spring morning, I woke up and walked to find the tree, knowing it existed on this land that holds me and us.