October 19th, 2022
Data
(Picture: October 18th)
I will write more about the look of the tree below, but the color is absolutely brilliant. The tree is thinning, much like the hair of a middle-aged man, but fascinatingly in an almost even fashion. I spent some time touching the leaves and expected them to be brittle. In fact, they are very smooth and almost leathery. The veins, I noticed, also seem more visible now perhaps due to the color change. The outside of the leaves seem more jagged to the touch, but by and large the leaves themselves feel very substantial while simultaneously silky. When I touched the first leaf, however, it fell from the tree as if it were hanging on by a thread. I notice that the bottom of the stem of the leaf seems tougher to the touch. I shook the tree gently and another leaf fell.
We had a dramatic wind on October 10th (pictured below) and I was amazed the leaves did not fall. How much has changed in ten days!
I also spent some time feeling the trunk today. While the bark is rough to touch and quite brittle, the trunk itself feels incredibly solid. More solid than I remember. I also notice how tall the branches reach. Cherry appears to be very healthy, solid, and doing well in her preparation for winter.
Affect
As I looked out of the window of my home office on October 10th, the words of Psalm 1:3 rolled around my mind:
They are like a tree planted by streams of water,
which yields its fruit in season
and whose leaf does not wither—
whatever they do prospers.
I was amazed at how this tree, as relatively small as it is, held its own against the wind. It knew how to bend with the wind and stay strong. I prayed that I, too, could bend with the wind of the Spirit and not work against Her. I was actually mesmerized by its strength.
Today and yesterday, the text was Exodus 3:2:
“Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up.”
I am overwhelmed by the beauty of this tree. I’ve looked at it and marveled at how stunning it is so many times this week. I’m also amazed by how quickly it is changing its appearance. There is a big difference between the picture I posted above (taken yesterday) and how the tree looks today. There are fewer leaves now, but the color is more brilliant than I remember it ever being. I’ve been contemplating how deceiving looks can be. I didn’t expect the leaves to fall with such ease after my touch because they seemed so healthy still, even though the color had changed. But I paid attention to the wrong thing – it was the stem, not the leaf that I should have been looking at. I’m also aware that many people speak of Fall as a time of death. This isn’t quite right, though, and I’ve been thinking of this a lot as I look at this wonderful tree. Things are still growing, in fact, just in a different direction than we are used to. As Norman Wirzba, drawing from the wisdom of Karel Čapek notes:
“[Karel] Čapek observed that October is really the first spring month because the roots of healthy life are always embedded in the ground and so presuppose good soil preparation. Though vegetation has ceased to grow upward, in autumn, life grows downward.”1
Čapek further writes that
“We say that Nature rests, yet she is working like mad. She has only shut up shop and pulled the shutters down; but behind them she is unpacking new goods, and the shelves are becoming so full that they bend under the load. This is the real spring; what is not done now will not be done in April.”2
Mysterious things are happening. Mysterious things indeed.
Norman Wirzba, Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), Kindle loc. 56.
Karel Čapek, The Gardener’s Year (New York: Modern Library, 2002), 116. Quoted in Wirzba, Food and Faith, 56