The trees outside my house that surround the square I live at have just shed all of their leaves. Their relatives at the riverbanks nearby are in that phase where only in their tops some rustling movement of yellow and brown leafs can be noticed. The redness and fullness of fall have passed and gone and we are now in that in-between state where it’s not yet winter but no longer fall.
When all the leaves finally shed and autumn loses her beauty, I feel a strange sense of relief. It’s a relief that started when summer ended, and all the high hopes could finally bend down and be replaced by a more surrendering quality. I love that sigh of fall. I guess fall is not only so gorgeous because of its colors and richness, but also because it is such a loud performance of impermanence. There is no getting around it when you see the tree outside your house shedding its leaves, offering them to our heads and car windows.
In that loud, gorgeous, red, green and yellow bitter-sweet beauty, I dread the moment when all of the leaves will be gone and the only sight for months to come will be the barren branches outside my window. But once that moment arrives, it relieves me of something –I’m not quite sure of what.
I guess when it’s this thing that happens when deep truths like are revealed; healing. The truth of impermanence is probably the one we fight most. Yet like the trees we have to shed in order to survive. But there’s more to healing than necessity. Last week I’ve been reminded of that famous saying that “the truth will set you free”. However painful truth or reality often is; facing things as they are is never as painful as resisting things as they are.
To the amount that we have the balls to face things as they are, we experience healing from the world. To the amount that we resist reality, we suffer. It really is as simple as that. Maybe that’s what the trees teach me, standing in all their nakedness but never letting themselves forget that they are perfect as they are, where they are; facing things as they are in all their tree-ness.
