ANOTHER NATURE STUDY

                                             

I stood looking out the window this morning, watching the leaves fall from my birch clump. There wasn’t any breeze; it was a calm day, leaving the lake shimmering like a sheet of glass. The falling leaves from the tree seemed to be giving up and surrendering their grip on the tree they had lived on all summer. The leaves seemed to imply it was over-for now and they were telling the tree the time had come to let go. That the close family relationship they had enjoyed since spring had come to an inevitable end. For the leaves it was the end, but for the tree it is just a brief hiatus, for it knows that life will go on. That come spring it will replenish itself.

The tree and its leaves are codependent to some extent and one cannot live without the other. Except that the tree has within its powers the ability to go dormant without its leaves and then reincarnate itself come spring. It cannot remain dormant indefinitely. Yet it doesn’t have to wither and die and then reseed itself to propagate either. It must go through this process to live because of the waning sunlight and weather extremes that are outside of what it needs to sustain life.

Joyce Kilmer wrote in his poem  “Trees,”  “A tree whose hungry mouth is prest. Against the earth’s sweet breast.” It suggests that not only is the tree dependent on the leaves but it is also dependent on the earth that it stands rooted in. That same earth in turn is dependent to some degree on those same leaves that die and decay, providing nutrients to feed the tree in the next growing cycle. Kilmer goes on to talk about another facet-- the birds that live within its branches. “A tree that may in summer wear. A nest of robins in her hair.”

It seems so fascinating when we talk about the intricacies’ of nature. For when you don’t limit yourself to seeing just the tree-- but you see the whole picture and all the details that come into it.  It’s within this that we realize how nature can only exist when it lives in harmony with each other. Take away the tree and the leaves die. Sterilize or poison the earth and the trees die. Take away the tree and the habitat it provides and the birds and animals have no place to live, no place to shelter in.

We have no assurances that the tree will come back to life in the spring but nature is pretty resilient and it has been through this process more times then we care to study. So we hope yes-- but beyond that we leave it to a greater power. Back to Kilmer, “Poems are made by fools like me. But only God can make a tree.” We can help nature exist and in some ways we can even change it for the better but the whole master plan for nature seems to defy explanation, at least at our level.

In this sometimes-complicated world we live in, filled with so many plants and animals, we sometimes struggle to understand the complexity of nature and how in the grand picture, it all fits so nicely together. There are many people on this earth that wouldn’t for a minute be intrigued by the falling leaves like I was. They couldn’t care less about what lives and dies. Only their own selfish desires to accumulate wealth and power and often with no regard for nature.