A Seasonal Anthology Autumn’s surrender
If there’s a surrender required from the leaves of deciduous trees in Autumn perhaps the accompanying words to ‘lean in and let go’ is their necessary heart’s cry. Apart from one or two that remain resistant, the majority of leaves succumb to the inevitable and submit to their part to play in the next cycle of their tree's life flow.
And as the season’s chill winds whip up a frenzy and the reality of winter's approach is upon them, the branches that have been beautifully dressed in their costumes of green, orange, red and ochre will soon be naked.
Trees are incredibly adept at ‘leaning’. Mostly, even in the fiercest storms trees; trunks and branches know how to move with, not against the prevailing wind. Proof of this lies on the south-west boundary of my garden where I’ve planted a row of large trees. Standing back and observing, one can see clearly that each of them has taken on a permanent lean towards the north-east. Right from the start they were destined not to be straight, a stance the southerly wind that blows through and across the valley behind our property has made sure of. But the fact that they have adapted to their conditions is just one of the wonderful markers of their wisdom.
They don’t fight, rather they move with the intensity of the pressure that is put on them. They lean with, not against.
Now of course if I was a farmer trying to protect crops or stock then I would have planted a shelter belt such as a row of poplars which grow into upright giants both in height and girth, seemingly able to withstand the pressure of the prevailing winds which, coincidentally, were originally growing on our quarter acre boundary when we arrived many years ago. The previous owners clearly knew about those southerly blasts and the poplar’s ability to shelter the garden, but because of their size and the potential destruction that would have ensued if, in a very strong wind they came down on our house, we made the decision a few years ago to fell them.
Being a lover of trees it was a sad day for me, particularly these being poplars whose slender presence also graced the bottom boundary of my childhood home garden. They have their own particular smell and their nimble and flexible branches were perfect for making a bow to bend for an arrow, or for the base of a kite. Ironically when we bought our current property years ago, the sign that it was for us (for me anyway) was specifically this row of nostalgia. I hugged each one of them the evening before they came down and left home in the dark the next morning so that I didn’t have to hear the sound of the chainsaw cutting deep into their veins, slowly sapping their life-blood as the ‘tree-fellows’ did their work. Of course, after time and some serious grieving and mulching I replanted our current trees that now grow on a permanent lean, albeit much more in keeping with an urban quarter acre. You can’t have it all.
On another boundary of ours that borders a small native grove is a family of kanuka and in a storm, the branches of these trees just dance! One can imagine a choreographed sequence, almost a concert performance as they swoop low to kiss the ground, and then stretch as high as their long limbs allow, brushing the low clouds that mists their slender fingers. Their secret to survival, it seems, is both in their flexibility and in their allowing.
Rather than resist, they embrace.
There is such a powerful metaphor here, a wonderful invitation from nature to portray how not to position ourselves (we humans) in a storm. Oftentimes when the pressure comes on we turn and face it head on, throwing caution to the wind and refusing stubbornly to believe that we can be battered and bruised. The fear of suffering an unrecoverable loss or blow to our ego drives us to make an art of refusal; the determination not to give in to something that threatens our sense of purpose, perhaps agenda. But trees seem to know how to both lean and lose. They intuitively know when their time to let go is upon them.
At the end of Autumn there is often left on my peach blossom tree a small handful of resistant leaves, holding on in bloody minded stubbornness refusing to give in to the rhythms of nature. I observe these as I rake up the fallen who seem willing to be piled into bags that are then tossed behind the shed on the damp ground where they will turn, a miraculous reincarnation, into dark, worm filled soil and mulch. The alternative to my gathering would be to leave them to the ruthless munching in the jaws of the lawnmower. But I know when the time is right to gather them and somehow they seem to dance in the wind and delight at my arrival with a big black sack. Their summer purpose to guard and protect fruit being long over, and now submitting to autumn’s grim reaper, they take on a whole new life intuitively knowing that after winter’s slow death they will be back, transformed into black gold that I will pile onto my vegetable garden, maybe as a flower that grew from the goodness of the compost, or for the ones that resisted the winds of change as food for the tree’s next summer of fruitfulness.
