Nature Speaks

Yesterday, during a winter walk, I noticed a young oak still holding on to its leaves. Around it, the larger oaks had already let go. Their branches were bare, their silhouettes quiet against the pale sky, their seasonal work complete. This smaller tree stood differently. Its leaves were dry now, browned and curled, yet still attached, catching the light and giving the tree a presence that the others no longer had.

I stopped for a while, careful not to rush to interpretation. Not everything we notice needs to become a lesson.

There was something gently unsettling about this tree being out of step with the rest. Nothing dramatic. Nothing defiant. Just slightly delayed, as if it were moving according to another rhythm, responding to a slower internal clock. The leaves made a faint sound when the breeze passed through them, more a whisper than a rustle. A sound that seemed to belong neither fully to autumn nor to winter, but to a narrow space between the two.

I realised how often I walk past moments like this without really stopping. My eyes register them, but my body keeps moving. Attention skims the surface and moves on. Nothing settles.

When we pause, however, the landscape begins to reveal itself differently. Not through messages or symbols, but through small variations. Through exceptions that quietly resist uniformity. Through details that would remain invisible if we stayed in motion.

The oak was not trying to teach me anything. It was not standing in for an idea or offering a metaphor. It was simply continuing, in its own time, to hold what it had grown.

I left it there, unchanged by my noticing. But as I walked on, my pace softened slightly. Not because I had learned something new, but because something familiar had been remembered: that there is more than one way to move through change, and more than one way to let go.