The Story Between Branch and Leaf
Spring - Week 20 - On Vulnerability Wearing Its Finest Green
In Her Nature is a year long exploration into the healing power of the natural world. Season by season, setting out to awaken the spirit, and rekindle joy. The weekly journal of a neighborhood, its plants and birds and creatures — and how they are helping repair a heart and rebirth a soul.
The leaves have been emerging for weeks, their growth steady and incremental, yet somehow it's only now that I truly see them. There's a threshold crossed. A moment when the collective effect of countless tiny unfurlings suddenly transforms the landscape. What had been stark silhouettes against the spring sky now wear a deepening green, with edges illuminated in chartreuse. That electric, yellowish-green that seems to capture sunlight itself and pulse with new life. Those initial hints of color have multiplied and strengthened, no longer tentative whispers but confident declarations. Branches still visible but increasingly veiled by this gathering of abundance.
This brief state is a unique spectacle that exists for merely days or barely weeks. There's an exquisite vulnerability in witnessing branches half-clothed, their woody architecture still visible beneath emerging buds. The trees stand in quiet testimony to change itself, catching light differently than they will just days from now, creating dappled patterns that will soon give way to deeper shade. These fleeting moments once again reveal nature's patient unfolding - a gradual revelation.
How often we miss these intermediate states, these beautiful pauses between one season and the next. We notice winter's bareness and summer's abundance. But the delicate transition – when buds first crack open and tiny leaves unfurl like tightly coiled ferns, slips past our awareness. It's in these liminal moments between seasons that I return again to find nature reflecting my own experience. The trees in their partial dressing mirror my healing journey — no longer raw with grief's exposure, yet still finding my way toward wholeness. There's a peculiar solace in this shared middle state, where change declares itself but doesn't yet dominate the landscape.
The evidence of transformation surrounds me daily. Yellow pollen dusts every surface. Cars, sidewalks, puddles turned golden, as if the trees themselves are making visible their invisible work of creation. Today, I watched a nuthatch navigate headfirst down a maple trunk, its movement a gentle defiance of expected paths. It found a meal in the bark's crevices that were once fully exposed but now gradually disappear behind unfurling green. Such perfect timing — a rare sighting before summer's fullness hides them away. I find myself drawn to these small synchronicities, these reminders that nature's choreography continues whether we witness it or not, each creature and element playing its part in the unfolding story of renewal.
There is something mesmerizing to me about this dance of revelation and concealment that trees perform throughout the year. In winter, they stand unabashedly naked, their elegant structure exposed to the elements. There's a certain dignity, even pride, in this bareness – nothing hidden, nothing concealed. The winter tree makes no apologies for its stark beauty, for the twisting pathways of branches that reach toward sky and earth simultaneously. In these gnarled limbs and weathered trunks, we can read the stories of decades. Each bend and furrow a testament to storms weathered, droughts endured, and countless seasons of light. These elders stand through generations, their rings holding memories we can only glimpse when they are most revealed.
What draws me deeper is not the spectacle of individual seasons but the wisdom in their seamless progression. How trees show us that concealing and revealing are not opposites but necessary companions, each giving meaning to the other. By August, the memory of bare branches feels distant, as each tree dissolves into a thick green conversation of leaves. Then gradually, as if yearning for the clarity of silence, they begin their return journey, shedding their leafy abundance layer by layer. This cyclical undressing feels less like loss and more like returning to an essential truth. Beneath every covering waits the quiet strength that endures when all else falls away.
I've come to believe that trees exist beyond our human narratives of progress and decline, loss and gain. They offer a different wisdom. One of perpetual renewal without attachment to any single state. The tree never laments its bare branches nor clings to its summer fullness. It simply continues its patient unfurling and release, indifferent to our tendency to judge states as better or worse, complete or incomplete.
These insights deepen when we step closer to the earth. While planting seedlings yesterday, I uncovered a portly fat toad nestled beneath the soil. A creature of quiet transformation itself, moving between water and land throughout its life. It gazed at me with ancient eyes before disappearing beneath a stone, revealing that while trees transform above, countless others unfold below. The world is whispering its truths to us not in grand pronouncements, but in small moments of wonder.
As humans, we too cycle through seasons of revelation and concealment. There are times when we stand emotionally bare, our vulnerabilities exposed, our foundations visible. Then come periods of tentative growth, when we try on new ways of being, unfurling aspects of ourselves that have remained dormant. We experience seasons of fullness when we bloom into our potential, and seasons of release when we shed what no longer serves us.
The trees understand this wisdom better than we do. Each year, they grow more fully into themselves, adding rings of experience, reaching higher and deeper simultaneously. They don't fight their transformation but surrender to it with grace, becoming more of themselves with each passing season.
They teach us that none of these states is permanent, and none is inherently better than the others. Each is necessary, each beautiful in its own way. The half-clothed tree, caught between bareness and fullness, reminds us to honor these transitions in ourselves, and to find meaning in the thresholds, the in-between places where transformation quietly unfolds.
Perhaps this is why these spring trees in their partial awakening captured my attention so powerfully. They stand as living reminders that change is not just about beginnings and endings, but about the sacred middle places where we are neither what we were nor what we will become – but something uniquely beautiful in the act of becoming itself. And in their presence, I find a quiet healing, a reminder that grief and growth are not opposites but companions on the same journey.
—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let's experience nature's gifts together.
As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.
Love,
Jane
This was a beautiful read, so much wisdom. I could read it several times and take something new from it each time. Thank you 💚
Jane, I'm particularly drawn to your words: "change is not just about beginnings and endings, but about the sacred middle places where we are neither what we were nor what we will become – but something uniquely beautiful in the act of becoming itself."
My dad has a large maple tree in his front yard that was struck by lighting several years ago and almost split down the middle. He refused to cut it down as people recommended. Instead he provided it with wooden props to try to help it continue growing. It is now fully healed with a sturdy trunk and an abundance of leaves. It seems to be saying thank you for the loving care.