Image © Trevor Anzai 2023

As a culture, we don’t often think about dying. Yet everything in life has its season of growth. There’s a beginning, a growing, and then a dying. Death can be fearful and pushed to the side. Truly, it’s not unnatural, but natural, not the end itself, but a beginning. For the tree that sheds its fall leaves is the very tree that will have new growth next spring, with new birds and creatures living with it.

If nature teaches us something, it lets us know that the transition itself can be beautiful. Can we not relate? We’re in a continual process of growing, learning, and becoming. We’re unfinished products—wouldn’t we consider ourselves wiser and more mature than twenty years ago? Imagine who we might become in ten or twenty years from now. What part needs to die and experience rebirth? A maple leaf has something to teach us.

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