The Leaves Are Coming

For the past month, I’ve been writing mostly from a new location. While I wait for morning temperatures above 50, at which time I will bundle up and go outside to write in the fresh morning air with the birds and the sky and the trees, I sit and write by the southern window at the back of the cottage where I now live. We’ve been slowly moving out of the Temple and though we will stay on as the guiding teachers of our Zen community, Melissa and I will no longer be the residents and managers of the Temple building where we have lived in for the past eleven years.

We sometimes refer to our modest arts-and-crafts house as our ‘place in the country’, though it’s only a quarter-mile from the Temple and still well within Worcester city limits. We’re happy to be a few blocks from the thoroughfare of Pleasant Street, nestling into a low-traffic neighborhood with modest homes.

A few weeks ago, I moved my desk and barcalounger to their new location here in the cottage. That was a tipping point for me. Throughout April, I sat in the newly relocated barcalounger and looked out at a new view—southeastward through branches to the rooftop of a neighbor’s house to the trees and sky beyond. Now that May is here, leaves are beginning to fill in the space between branches and between me and my neighbor’s house. Soon, I suspect, my view of their house and the sky above will be fully obstructed by these seasonal flat factories of green. I’ll miss the sky but appreciate the coming green comfort of privacy.

Things change a lot here in New England through the seasons. The hardwood deciduous trees—maple, oak, beech and birch—that fill our abundant forests and grace our towns and even cities are the immobile witnesses and silent supporters of our incessant bipedal rush. Bare for six months and clothed in leaves for the next six, they alternately hide and reveal. In the winter, the contours and textures of the landscape (and houses) around us are laid bare. Beginning in April and coming into fullness in May, the leaves return, like a great green migration, to soften the harsh austerity of our winter viewing.

One mature oak can easily generate over 200,000 leaves each year with a total weight of nearly 60 pounds. I say ‘easily’ generate, but I don’t know how it is for an oak, or for that matter for a maple or beech or any other tree. The leaves come from the buds that are all but invisible through the winter. They swell in late March and April, and now the fantastic green leaves appear everywhere. First, as a golden green blush sweeping the hillsides, now rising to a fullness that softens and obstructs our views for the next five months. We who live on this land that once belonged to the Nipmuck peoples are happy for the obstruction.

These New England trees are part of a worldwide global oxygen generating system that is being degraded daily by the aggressive timber harvesting and land clearing that our modern lifestyle requires. Many have warned us that this is not a sustainable strategy and the urgency of our situation increases daily. How do we realize and take action on what is so obvious and life-threatening to the lives of us all and the mothers and fathers and children who will come after us?

On a soft spring morning, with the light filtering through the small and healthy green leaves, it’s hard to appreciate both the wondering of this ongoing miracle and the reality of the daunting and determined effort that will be required to move toward a sustainable global future.