The Tree Who Kept Watch

Fall – Week 43 – The Wisdom of Bare Branches

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 Autumn Purple ash outside my bedroom window stands as both a timekeeper and teacher. I named him Maximus during those long days of my recovery, when I lay in bed with little to do but study his magnificent form. His Latin name, *Fraxinus americana*, carries the weight of science, but the name I gave him speaks to who he became to me: a gentle giant keeping watch, a philosopher robed in bark and leaf, reaching sixty feet into the Colorado sky.

During those weeks of healing, we developed an intimate rhythm. Each morning, I would check his progress, noting the subtle shifts in his canopy. The Autumn Purple ash, true to his cultivar’s promise, began his annual performance with leaves shifting from summer’s green into that deep, unmistakable purple. The color of bruises healing, of twilight deepening, of mysteries unfolding. He wore his purple crown with dignity, as befitting his stature, but he wasn’t finished. As autumn progressed, those purple leaves burned into fire reds and molten yellows, each day bringing new variations on the theme of change.

I remember watching in quiet wonder as particularly spectacular combinations of color emerged. In my immobility, this tree became my entertainment, my calendar, my proof that transformation was possible even when standing still. We were both rooted in place that autumn. He in soil, me in sheets. Both proving that the deepest changes happen when we cannot run from them.

Then came that day of high winds, when nature choreographed its own version of Dorothy’s Kansas tornado. I watched from my window as my companion was stripped bare, his leaves torn away and sent spiraling across my neighbor’s lawn, pooling in corners where houses met gardens, mixing with leaves from all the neighborhood trees in a swirling autumn confetti. It felt personal, watching this undressing. There was an intensity to it, yes, but also grace. Each leaf releasing its hold, surrendering to forces larger than itself. The howling wind created a symphony around his trunk, and when it finally stilled, the silence that followed felt sacred. He stood there, dignified even in his nakedness, only a few determined leaves clinging to branches like final thoughts before sleep.

What struck me most profoundly was how different it felt this time. With the crown bare, the Flatirons returned to my window frame. Those ancient sandstone formations I knew would reappear, yet seeing them again while lying in recovery made them feel newly significant. My tree, in his annual gesture, had stepped aside to remind me of something else: stone and sky, distance and permanence, the bones of the earth itself. The same view I’d seen every winter now spoke differently, of endurance, of what stands firm beneath all our transformations.

The seasonal undressing has become a marker in my own calendar of healing. By some strange synchronicity, the leaves always begin their final descent a few weeks after the anniversary of my own fall. The tree, in its wisdom, offers me a continual reminder that falling is not failure but transformation. That being stripped bare can reveal new vistas, and that vulnerability can be its own strength.

This week, as high winds once again pulled at those familiar branches, I found myself thinking about the inverse of what I’d observed in spring. Not the tender clothing of new growth, but the courage required for undressing. If spring is about trust in becoming, perhaps autumn is about trust in release. Watching more closely, I realized this isn’t destruction but collaboration: the tree and wind dancing together in their timeless exchange. Neither force nor surrender, but something more nuanced. The wind taking only what the tree is ready to release, the tree bending but not breaking, both partners in this necessary unburdening. The ash seems to know this in its heartwood, that letting go isn’t loss but conversation, a dialogue between what holds and what yields, between the rooted and the restless. Each leaf that flies knows something about timing, when holding becomes a burden rather than a blessing.

Earlier this week, the world offered another kind of wisdom. Golden light slanted low across the autumn sky, that particular quality of light that only comes when Earth tilts away from sun. And in this luminous hour, across the open fields beyond my neighborhood, a murmuration of birds appeared. They might have been starlings or grackles, I couldn’t tell in the darkening air. But their identity mattered less than their movement, their iridescent bodies writing and rewriting themselves against the sky.

I watched, transfixed, as hundreds of individual birds became one fluid organism, swooping and banking in perfect synchrony. No leader directed their movements; instead, each bird seemed to know only the bird beside it. Yet together they painted something impossible on the evening sky. They occupied what felt like a liminal space, suspended between heaven and earth.

The murmuration reminded me that nature teaches in many ways. During my recovery, I had only Maximus to watch, his steady presence outside my window marking time while my body slowly mended. We were strange companions then – both of us changing in our own necessary ways.

Now, years later, the diamond patterns on his bark seem familiar. Those crisscrossing ridges and furrows mapping years of growth, adaptation, survival. In our quiet conversations, I’ve traced those patterns with my eyes, reading history like braille. This ash has weathered decades of these cycles. He knows the difference between what matters and what doesn’t.

As I write this, preparing for another winter with Maximus standing sentinel outside my window, I find comfort in his familiar wisdom. The quiet months ahead are not empty but are pregnant with possibility. Beneath bark and soil, in the invisible realm of dormancy, next year’s leaves are already being imagined.

Sometimes I wonder if trees can sense the weight of human attention, the quality of desperate hope projected onto their branches. I like to think Maximus knew he was helping, that his steady presence was intentional, a kind of arboreal compassion. When the wind moves through his bare branches now, it sounds like whispers, like encouragement, like a friend saying: “See? We made it through another season. Keep going!”

So, in this time when leaves fall and light grows precious, I’m a grateful student learning to read the world differently again. The annual undressing no longer speaks only of loss, but of courage. The courage to let go, to stand naked before winter, to trust that revelation and renewal come wrapped in honesty.

Next spring, when the tree clothes itself again in green, I’ll greet each new leaf as a small resurrection. But for now, in this season of beautiful bareness, we will stand together, two friends who understand how much sky there is when the leaves are gone.

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—> 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