What leaves are you holding on to?

 

The landscape sure has changed a lot this month, hasn’t it? In what seems like no time at all, we went from some fantastic fall color the gray, drab, leafless skeletons we’ll be looking at for the next half year. So it goes here in our little spot on this planet. 

Personally, I could do without all the cold and ice and snow. I’m not a fan of winter’s short days and the barren gray of the leafless forests, but there’s nothing I can do about that. Except maybe go to Florida for a while.

You ever stop to think about the process of trees making leaves through spring and summer then just letting them go in the fall? Of all the ways that plants could have adapted in this part of the planet, why that way? Why put all that energy into creating all that biomass, using it to create the energy needed to grow and live, then just drop it all to the ground? 

It’s one of the many fascinating mysteries of the natural world. 

Don’t get me wrong. The strategy clearly works, and not just to the benefit of the tree. Sure, the leaves harvest solar energy through the incredible mechanism of photosynthesis (again, of all the strategies plants could have come up with, how – and why – did that particular one win out?). That energy, coupled with elements from rain, air, and soil, fuels the tree’s growth. In the process, the tree exhales, contributing life-sustaining oxygen to the air, making the world habitable for so many other things, us included.

Then the process stops. The leaves give up their photosynthetic green, turn all sorts of stunning colors, then fall to the ground to decay away.

But that’s not where the miracle ends, is it? Even detached from the tree that spawned them, those leaves continue contributing to our existence. The making of those leaves pulled carbon from the air that then gets transferred to the soil as those leaves decay. But before then, those leaves provide a blanket to untold little creatures that overwinter beneath their protective cover. Creatures we rely on for pollination, pest control, water quality, soil health, and lord-knows-what-else.

And as those leaves break down – with the help of untold critters, fungi, and other decomposers - they contribute critical nutrients and organic matter to the soil. Soil which then nourishes the parent tree, and others around it, related and not, strengthening their roots and trunk as they reach taller and broader, thus capturing more sunlight and carbon and providing shade and refuge for the creatures we’re more apt to notice on our walks in the woods. 

It all happens right before our eyes. Yet we rarely notice.

If you read this column with any regularity, maybe you’ve noticed that I like to find lessons in the natural world that can improve our way of being human. I can’t help but see a metaphor here.

How many of us cling so tightly to certain ways of thinking, ways of doing, ways of being? How invested are we in holding on to things we put significant resources into? How often does that inflexibility, that death grip on the “old ways” impede our progress or prevent us from becoming the people we want to be? 

What if we took lessons from trees? What if we let go of those “leaves” of old ways of thinking, doing, or being? What if we could drop that which no longer serves us to clear the way for new, while growing in the process? 

Letting go is hard. Scary. But so often necessary. 

This year my wife and I had one of many letting go situations with our kids, now aged nine and six as they took to riding the bus to and from school and no longer getting rides from their mother. A small thing on the surface, sure, but for us (and especially for my wife) it was yet another step away from their reliance on us and a step toward their independence. And that’s as it should be, but there’s certainly an element of letting go that strikes an emotional chord. Her babies are less and less so every day. And considering wifey is overwhelmingly responsible for having kept them alive – and healthy – this long (I certainly can’t claim much credit there, I can’t remember to lower the toilet seat), I can’t blame her for shedding a tear as the bus pulled away. 

Letting go is hard.

What leaves are you holding too tightly to? What could you let go of that would allow you grow as a person, a parent, a friend, a neighbor? In the words of the princess my kids no longer watch: let it go.  

Then get outside. You probably have raking to do. 

This is the monthly "Living Land" column I write for the local newspapers here in Des Moines County, Iowa.