Watching Leaves Fall

Part II of The Secret Life of Trees

  This morning, like every morning, I sat outside and drank my coffee on my front deck. It is very mild and humidity free for a mid-August, Southeast Texas day. I noticed that several leaves on the sweet gum trees and oaks have already begun to turn yellow. Signs of an early fall perhaps? There was not a breeze of any sort. No leaf rustled or moved. The birds were even unusually quiet. Calm. And just as I looked one of the yellow leaves turned loose and began a slow motion, fluttering dance to the ground. This dance was repeated several times as I finished my cup of coffee. I am surrounded by beautiful sweet gum, oak, very tall majestic pines, and even one large magnolia tree. Green. Green in every direction I look. With the falling of that first leaf, however, I am reminded that all of it will soon change. The leaves will fall, the grass will turn brown, and the flowers will fade. The color will be washed away like paint on a canvas left out in the rain. With that first leaf that fluttered to the ground, sadness overtook me. But somehow mixed with that sadness is a sense of joy as well. I like the cooler weather of fall and winter. And even as that first leaf hit the ground there is a promise of rebirth. I take it for granted that spring will follow winter. Renewal is guaranteed. I don’t question it. I know that spring will come. It is not a question of faith or belief. I know it.

  In our lives we too are like the trees. We have our spring, summer, fall, and winter. In such a cycle, I am very aware that I have reached the fall of my life. In a way that realization brings me the same twinge of sadness that I felt watching that first leaf fall. I know winter is coming. For me to think that there is no promise of some sort of spring to follow winter would plunge me into the deepest melancholy that I would never be able to find my way out of again. But just like I know there will be a spring in nature, I know that there is a spring awaiting me as well. For me, it is not a matter of faith or belief. I know it with a deep down understanding that I can never explain to or convince anyone of. How do I know it? How can I be sure that my knowledge is not just wishful thinking? That I don’t know. But somehow, when I examine it closely, I just know that the end of this life is not the end of me. That knowledge gives me comfort and the will to push on.

  To each of us individually, all the people we know, care about, and love are like so many leafs on the branches of our lives. One by one they fade and fall away from us. It is very hard to escape the sadness of their falling away. Does the tree mourn each leaf that falls? Probably. But in its quiet winter repose, deep down it knows that new leaves will grow and take their place. Someday the tree itself will fall away, making room for new trees to grow and prosper. Such is the way of life. Will its fellow trees miss it and mourn its passing? I for one think they do. But why must it be so? Many have asked me that question. Why does entropy exist in all things? Why did simple life become more and more complex? And why does complexity ultimately decay and fall back into simplicity again. Why do things seem to evolve or adapt? Why do things change? Simple life forms with only single cells existed for millions and millions of years and were doing just fine apparently. What was the impetus that pushed them towards complexity? Why couldn't single cell life forms have been the be all and end all of existence? Why couldn't each cell have been so perfect that it was immortal? Questions like these lead me to believe that there is much more going on than life just being life.

  When you get down to it, we and the trees according to the biologists are just a collection of chemicals and chemical reactions. To the physicists we are just a collection of atoms. To the quantum physicists we are not even that. Instead we are sub-atomic packets of potential energy that only exists in this reality when an observer is observing them. Are chemicals alive? Are atoms? A piece of metal is made up of some of the same atoms that we are supposedly made up of. Is it alive? Life then is apparently something other than and greater than the sum of our parts. The individual parts (atoms or chemicals or packets of energy) are not by definition alive. And no matter how many of them you stack on top of one another can they be said to be alive. But yet we and the trees live. I am confident that the essence that breathes life into lifeless things is what really matters and is perfect and eternal. Call that essence what you like. But it is the knowledge of that essence that gives me hope and keeps me putting one foot before the other. I cannot express these sentiments so well as Emerson, Longfellow, Tennyson, and Frost – my favorite poets. But they studied nature and very much tried to express these same understandings with all the eloquence of language they could muster. By studying nature they somehow came to the same conclusion – that there is so much more to life than just living and dying. So much more as Tennyson put it than nature simply being “red in tooth and claw”.