Lessons From a Maple Tree
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Why do the leaves of autumn dance in the wind when they take on their golden hue? That dance is what I enjoy watching from my porch during the beautiful transition from the heat of summer to the chill of winter. Fall is that beautiful transition—a season in its own right. My backyard holds two treasures I did not plant: a giant seventy-five-year-old maple and a deliciously sweet walnut tree. Their majestic branches are home to woodpeckers, mourning doves, and the common brown squirrels of North Alabama. These trees teem with life in spring, summer, fall, and winter. The sounds and flights of the birds in the trees are often joined with southern white pelicans, migrating geese, ducks, and swans on ponds and streams.
Most enjoyable of all is the call of the mourning doves as they issue their mournful yet joyous coos. Today I noticed, in addition to the energy and beauty of nature’s birds and animals, the beauty of plants during the starkest season of the year.
After the flourish of flowers and vegetables of summer, we are now fully into fall. My backyard also agrees that it is fall; everything is falling.
My walnut tree has shed all her leaves and nuts, with help from the foraging squirrels. But the maple tree tells another story. Her leaves are golden red and glitter in the noonday sun. And her leaves are slowly, gently falling to the ground.
How elegantly they fall. The wind assists in bringing grace to the orchestrated descent of each leaf. Even in fall and winter, nature reminds us that there is still beauty to be found, even during the slower seasons of life. The leaves transition from life to death while the tree rests through the winter, to flourish in spring when it enters another season of life.
There is beauty to be shared even while we rest.
Today, whether you are resting or active, choose to give “beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness” that someone is experiencing. In this way, we will “be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, that He may be glorified” (Isaiah 61:3, NKJV).
Today, let all creation testify of God!
Prudence Pollard
