The changing seasons has a way of rebooting my perspectives on life’s moving parts. It’s also an opportunity for me to find, even create, connections that could lead me to alternate choices about work and family, problems and challenges, as well as my own professional and personal goals. The fall suggests possibilities with a palette of colors where each one suggests a sentiment to whatever I’m feeling or thinking. More often than not, I make one, perhaps 2 attachments of color to an idea, an attitude, or even a condition that’s been entrenched in a mood of some sort which I cannot correlate or let go of.
However, when the maples, birch, oaks and other trees reveal their once covered limbs, I see a “wireframe” ready for a season of open air, of white space and a period of quiet and rest. Once again, it’s a reboot of sorts given the visual clues of autumn.
From a distance these bare trees take on an innocuous albeit familiar appearance. You realize that these wireframes silhouetted against a grey forest floor or an overcast sky has the potential to stimulate your way of visualizing beyond the obvious and the rote. Late fall and bare trees are midwives to modified or new byways to thinking and feeling.
Such possibilities make bare trees special. True, this past autumn the colors were fantastic, vibrant, even spectacular, more so than years past as far as I can tell. That festival of color has its own cathartic energy. Compared to just a few weeks ago, these now dormant, quiet trees are a type of dopamine, a suitable follow-on for my busy “monkey-mind.” There’s a levity and sense of calm with bare trees that’s akin to starting anew and refreshed.
The trees are steadfast and immobile and yet there’s a fluid-like form that draws your attention. And because you can see between the branches, openings of various shapes and dimensions become apparent. That white space becomes a cocoon for imagination and emotion, of things improbable that feel possible if only in theoretical form. What can you jettison from your mind into those spaces now in front of you? There are things each of us can let go of.
Many of the trees are straight up and down although the oaks and maples have a grace manifested by the sweeping reach of higher branches. The silhouette of these branches appear as arms with a soft curve, its ends like fingers gently reaching for the sky.
Late fall and bare trees are markers of change. In its most obvious forms, it means shorter days, cooler temperatures, fantastic light and shadow and a time change. The latter is likely the least wanted change this time of year. And yet the markers also remind us that still more change is to come. Some welcome winter [like me] and others can’t wait for spring.
In a personal way bare trees are anthropomorphic. They go through cycles of change just as we do with our life stages. And as in life, some of the bare trees will remain so in the months ahead. Just as some of us will, our own thoughts and feelings leaving our physical selves.
Bare trees can mirror our own life qualities season to season. Or maybe it’s the other way around; after all, trees have long existed before we arrived.
Carlo Centeno 